Transmarit is a guide to hardening Slackware Linux 10.2.0. It was written by Jeffrey Denton in January 2006, and covers most of the steps you’d want to take to securely lock down a Slackware server.

Locking down a system this much is probably unsuitable for home users, or on most workstations, but in the server environment, most of the security precautions mentioned make sense.

Of course, locking down a system brings with it inconvenience as well as security, and most sites will want to find a balance between security and usability. The document does lean somewhat more toward security, though.

There are actually some interesting tricks in there, such as checking if a user with UID zero is in fact root, and, if not, killing their processes and e-mailing the real root.

For those wishing to secure their Slackware servers, this makes an excellent read. In fact, even if you’re just looking to slightly increase the security of your home system, I’d say that reading this document would be a good place to start getting some ideas as to what you can and can’t do, and what sort of thing makes for good security.

Hardening a Linux system is the topic of many books and documents. Some try to be generic and cover the things you can do regardless of distribution, but many are written for the “popular” enterprise distributions such as RedHat and SuSE. It’s nice to see a Slackware one out there, and with such sound security information in it, Slackware should keep its reputation for security as well as speed and stability.