CentOS

While there are several modern and very secure network file sharing technologies, the good old File Transfer Protocol (FTP) remains one of the most widely used and popular protocols to share and transfer files between computers. There are a number of different FTP servers available in the Linux world. In this process, you will learn how to install and configure very secure FTP daemon (vsftpd), which is a well-known FTP server solution that supports a wide range of features and enables you to upload and distribute large files across a local network and the Internet.

Samba is a software package that enables you to share files, printers, and other common resources across a network. It is an invaluable tool for any working environment. One of the most common ways to share file resources across a heterogeneous network (meaning different computer systems such as Windows and Linux) is to install and configure Samba as a standalone file server to provide basic file-sharing services through user-level security with the use of the system user’s home directories.

Before a client computer can use file system exports shared by an NFS server, it has to be configured to correctly access this system. Here in this process, we will show you how to set things up and work with NFS on the client machine.

The Network File System (NFS) protocol enables remote access to filesystems over a network connection. It is based on a client-server architecture, allowing a centralized server to share files with other computers. A client can attach those exported shares in their own file system to access it conveniently, as they will be located on local storage. While Samba and AFP are more common distributed filesystems on Windows and OS X, NFS is now the de-facto standard and a key element of any Linux server system.

The Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) open standard can be used for sharing files over the network. It is a popular protocol to conveniently access remote data as an online hard disk. There are a lot of online storage and e-mail providers who offer online space through WebDAV accounts. Most graphical Linux or Windows systems can access WebDAV servers in their file managers out-of-the-box. For other operating systems, there are also free options available.

If a connection to a network needs to be made, every computer needs a correct Internet Protocol (IP) configuration installed on their system to communicate. Assigning IP client configurations automatically from a central point using the Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) can make the administrator’s life easier and simplify the process of adding new machines to a network in comparison to the tedious work of manually setting up static IP information on each computer system in your network.

Print servers allow local printing devices to be connected to a network and be shared among several users and departments. There are many advantages using such a system, including the lack of a need to buy dedicated printer hardware for each user, room, or department. The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is the de-facto standard for print servers on Linux, as well as Unix distributions including OS X.

While using FTP is still popular to share data or to transfer files over the network, you must be aware that you are using a very unsecure network protocol that has no protection built into it out-of-the-box. This means that, during network transfer, your data is fully exposed to potential attackers. This is not what you want for transferring sensitive data, such as login credentials, at all. To avoid these potential risks, we will show you in this process how to use and set up two alternatives for securing FTP using FTPS (FTP over SSL or FTP/SSL) or SFTPS (SSH-enabled FTP).

In this process, we will learn how to create self-signed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates using the OpenSSL toolkit. SSL is a technology used to encrypt messages between two ends of communication (for example, a server and client) so that a third-party cannot read the messages sent between them. Certificates are not used for encrypting the data, but they are very important in this communication process to ensure that the party you are communicating with is exactly the one you suppose it to be. Without them, impersonation attacks would be much more common.

In this process, we want to show you how to create your own firewalld service definitions or how to change existing ones, which any CentOS 7 system administrator should know if the predefined service files don’t fit your system’s need.