The two things that you are describing are older *n*x exploits. They affected earlier versions of Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and others, HP-UX, IRIX, AIX etc.. etc..

Although they could resurface some day, any day for that matter, most of the Flavors and Distro's have taken steps to correct this. A tut on writting buffer overflows can be found at http://www.insecure.org/stf/mudge_bu..._tutorial.html.

The ipstack in Red Hat is the same as in any linux Ditro running that version of the kernel or class of kernel ( 2.2.x, 2.4.x etc.).

I haven't messed around with tripping off a setuid binary locally so I really don't have much advice on doing this. To find out what is setuid and setgrpid on a system do:

# find / \( -perm -02000 -o -perm -04000 \) - ls

-- or to redirect it to a file --

# find / \( -perm -02000 -o -perm -04000 \) - ls > setXid.txt