Firewall

How to Configure /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and DNS Resolution on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and DNS Resolution on RHEL 9

DNS resolution on a Linux server is a multi-layered system. When an application calls getaddrinfo(“example.com”), the request passes through the Name Service Switch (NSS) framework, which consults sources in the order defined in /etc/nsswitch.conf — typically /etc/hosts first, then a DNS resolver. The DNS resolver reads its configuration from /etc/resolv.conf, which lists the DNS servers […]

Read more
How to Sync Time with Chrony on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Sync Time with Chrony on RHEL 9

Accurate time synchronization is not optional on a server — it is a hard requirement. TLS certificate validation fails when the clock is wrong by more than a few minutes. Kerberos authentication rejects tickets with a clock skew over 5 minutes. Cron jobs fire at the wrong time. Log correlation across multiple servers becomes impossible […]

Read more
Initial Server Setup with RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

Initial Server Setup with RHEL 9

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9, codenamed “Plow”) is the most significant release of RHEL in years, built on Linux kernel 5.14, OpenSSL 3.0, and shipped with a hardened-by-default security posture including SELinux enforcing mode, nftables as the default firewall backend, and full support for the latest POWER, ARM, and x86_64 architectures. Whether you […]

Read more
How to Add and Delete Users on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Add and Delete Users on RHEL 9

User account management is one of the most fundamental administrative tasks on any Linux server. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, every process, file, and network socket is owned by a user and group, making correct account hygiene essential for both security and auditability. Understanding the full lifecycle — creation, modification, and removal — and […]

Read more
How to Configure the Firewall on RHEL 9 with firewalld — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure the Firewall on RHEL 9 with firewalld

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 uses firewalld as its default firewall management daemon, backed by nftables as the kernel netfilter framework (replacing iptables which was the default in RHEL 7 and earlier). firewalld provides a zone-based model where each network interface is assigned to a trust zone — public, internal, dmz, trusted, and more — […]

Read more
How to Configure Fail2Ban to Protect SSH on RHEL 9 — step-by-step RHEL 9 tutorial on Progressive Robot

How to Configure Fail2Ban to Protect SSH on RHEL 9

Even with SSH key authentication enabled, a badly configured or temporarily accessible server with password auth still faces a constant barrage of brute-force login attempts. Fail2ban monitors log files for authentication failures, counts them per source IP, and when a configured threshold is crossed it issues a temporary ban by injecting a drop rule via […]

Read more
CHAT