CSC 358 Schedule

Wk 1

M 05 Jan Attendance, housekeeping. Overview of class. Description of lab environment. Assigned machines to students.

W 07 Jan Intended to start using machines. Lab cooling system failed, most lab services were dead. Machine room tour.

Wk 2

M 12 Jan

• Connect to VMware mgmt server; use VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC).
• Overview of Linux install process.
  • Start load of machines.
  • Refer to Virtual Machine setup page for installation parameters.
• Allow students to add class.

W 14 Jan Students should have a functioning Linux machine that they installed.

• Why linux? What's "free" mean? Linux is only free if your time has no value.
• Brief history of unix, linux. Linux heroes, Stallman, Torvalds.
• Brief look at our machines.
• Logging in.
• Proper start up and shut down (Nemeth, Chapter 2, pp. 32-36).
• Review of basic unix skills.
• Review and explanation of Linux installation.
• Packages, package management, what is an rpm?, where to get rpms, repositories and mirrors.
• Basic rpm commands.
  • Use rpm to add a package (VMware tools).

Wk 3

M 19 Jan *HOLIDAY* Students should have a functioning Linux machine, plus VMware tools, and fully updated. If you need to brush up on basic unix skills, use your machine to practice them. Read/review chapters in Nemeth on Rootly Powers and The Filesystem.

W 21 Jan

• More (finish up) on RPM. RPM lecture. RPM hands-on.
• Overview of YUM. Basic use of YUM. Update machines.

Wk 4

M 26 Jan

Note that your machines should be up and live on the network. If you're on campus, you can do most of your work from a terminal (secure shell) session, rather than using VIC. One good reason to use a terminal is that most let you cut and paste. From off campus, ssh to vogon, and then ssh to your machine (off campus direct access is blocked by firewall).

• Rootly Powers (Nemeth Chapter 3). Introduction to users. Managing users (Nemeth, chapter 6).
• Hands-on with users. Try and finish this in class.

W 28 Jan

• More on shells, bash shell scripting by guest lecturer Josh Lange.
• Hands on with bash. We'll work on this in class.

Wk 5

M 02 Feb

• More on users. Managing multiple users on multiple machines. Nemeth, chap 18, pps 513-534. Discuss weaknesses of traditional non-shadowed passwords. Cracking passwords (demo). Centralized user account management, NIS, NIS+, LDAP.

W 04 Feb

• Hand on mid-term done in class. Activities on midterm taken from previous hands on assignments. I'm going to do this on paper. Grading practical exercises by looking at 35 vm's has proven to not be practical. I suppose it could be automated somewhat, but I don't have the time for that now. The test be a few written discussion questions from the areas we have covered so far. Review the relevant chapters in Nemeth, and look over the in class activities and you should be OK.
• Here is the survey to help me decide what topics to cover in the remainder of class.

Wk 6

M 09 Feb

• Brief review of file permissions. Discuss "what goes where", the File system Hierarchy Standard (FHS).
• Introduction to disks and file systems.

W 11 Feb

• Hands on with whole disks.
• Hands on with partitioning disks.

F 13 Feb

• Goofy special case lecture schedule - We'll have Monday, Feb 16's lecture this day
• I hope to return midterms this day. I'll discuss them a bit.
• Logical volume managers. Hands on with LVM.

Wk 7

M 16 Feb *HOLIDAY*

W 18 Feb

• Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5. One of the better documents for Linux Software RAID is Linux Raid. Hands on with software RAID.

Wk 8

M 23 Feb

• Introduction to the Apache web server.

W 25 Feb

• Hands on with the Apache web server.

Wk 9

M 02 Mar

• Introduction to security.

W 04 Mar

• Hands on with security. We'll use the resources covered in lecture, "NSA Hardening Tips for RHEL 5" and others.

Wk 10

M 09 Mar

• More on security, network security, security audits, system scanning. Hands on with port scanning. We'll use nmap to scan each other's machines.

W 11 Mar

• System Administration as a profession. Go over final. Do class survey. Finish up labs you haven't completed.

Finals

16 - 20 Mar

• 16 March (Monday) Some people have requested an early final this day. I'm working on it. Details to follow.

---

Back Home.

---

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
© 2009 Gregory L. Porter.

---