Redhat linux has a command setup. With this text based tool one can configure the network, a simple firewall, the authentication and which system services to start up at boot. See also my article on chkconfig for detailed information on configuring system services.

My problem was that my hosting company gave me a Centos virtual machine with only a very minimal number of packages installed on it. So when I wanted to configure the firewall I could not find the command setup in /usr/bin. I had to install it with yum install setuptools.

The setup command seems to run a number of tools but it turned out that installing setuptools did not seem install any of these dependent tools. Therefore I installed the following using yum:

• system-config-securitylevel-tui: for configuring the firewall,
• authconfig: for configuring authentication,
• system-config-network-tui: for configuring the network,
• ntsysv: for configuring the system services.