When we think of Trojans, we normally think of the huge wooden horse that the Greeks gifted the city of Troy, in which they had secretly hidden a small number of their warriors. When the Trojans took the horse into the city the soldiers emerged and opened the gates to the cities enemies. Computer trojans are based on the same idea; what can appear to be useful program or harmless site can be hiding a small Trojan program that once it has infected your computer opens a secret backdoor that will allow an intruder to remotely gain access to your computer. Trojans are not viruses in that they are not designed to reproduce themselves. Instead they rely on being small and deceptive to propagate themselves across the internet, usually attached to some other file.

I believe that organization starts in UNIX. If your system is not well organized or you have not followed a consistent method, you may want to consider why this is a good idea. Many new administrators take simple organizational methodologies, such as the location of added software, for granted. A few months later the result is that changes, such as upgrades, require additional time to install and troubleshoot. In the end, you may save a considerable amount of time by doing three very simple things:

Establishing a Linux TCP/IP network requires two components of hardware: the network interface card (NIC) and the network medium. As with most things in life, you can opt to go for an inexpensive card and medium or spend lots more money for full-featured items. As the amount you spend increases, you get more functionality and benefits, although usually with diminishing returns for your dollar. Before deciding on the type of network interface cards to use (unless you already have some), you should decide on the type of cabling the network will use so the connectors on the network interface card can match. 10Base2 and 10Base-T are really the only two cables that you’ll want to consider. The alternatives are much more expensive or require special hardware.

The Domain Name System is one way to resolve host names in a TCP/IP environment. In non-Microsoft environments, host names are typically resolved through host files or DNS. In a Microsoft environment, WINS and broadcasts are also used. DNS is the primary system used to resolve host names on the Internet. In fact, DNS had its beginning in the early days of the Internet.In its early days, the Internet was a small network established by the Department of Defense for research purposes. This network linked computers at several government agencies with a few universities. The host names of the computers in this network were registered in a single HOSTS file located on a centrally administered server. Each site that needed to resolve host names downloaded this file. Few computers were being added to this network, so the HOSTS file wasn’t updated too often and the different sites only had to download this file periodically to update their own copies.