Computer Systems Administrators are typically responsible for most every aspect of a modern computing environment. This includes a range of tasks from specing, purchasing, assembling and installing new hardware; acquisition, installation, configuration and upgrading of the operating systems for that hardware; network setup, configuration and troubleshooting; finding, compiling, configuring and installing software; adding users and providing a stable environment and documentation for them; backing up and restoring user and machine data; and so on. The list is really endless, and your users or employers will have you doing all sorts of nasty things like helping to re-arrange their offices because it involves moving their computer equipment, and begging for help using M$ Fuziwat 2001... :)
Instructor:
Tor Mohling
tor@cs.colorado.edu
office ECCS 1B09 *ring bell*
x20677
hrs Monday 1 - 3PM (these are tentative)
Tues 12 - 2PM
TA: David Clements
clements@cs.colorado.edu
office hrs T.B.A
held in CSEL lab
This class will cover many of the basic tasks required in the day-to-day
operations of a modern unix environment.
In many respects, the following courses ought to be considered pre-requisites
for this class:
This is a hopeful outline of the class ;)
week
24 Jan - OS installation, packages
31 Jan - Booting and Shutting down; runlevels; init
7 Feb - Hardware; disks
14 Feb - Networking; TCP/IP; routing; NAT
21 Feb - Networking; NFS; AMD; other services
28 Feb - Networking; security cont; firewalls
7 Mar - MIDTERM
14 Mar - Email infrastructure; sendmail etc
21 Mar - WWW; apache; cgi
28 Mar - SPRING BREAK
4 Apr - Backups; users
11 Apr - X windows
18 Apr - Serial devices, PPP, printing
25 Apr - Large-installation issues
2 May - Wrap up
9 May - FINAL EXAM; same location, 7:30 - 10:30 PM
I may add stuff as we go, expanding more on some topics, being minimal
with others. I am also open to suggestions, if there are areas that the
class feels need more or less attention. Additionally some of the topics
might be presented by various other members of the CSops Crew.
Please also note that this class will not attempt to address every nuance of each topic, as this would take ten years at least. More importantly, it is an essential quality of a good systems administrator that she know where to look for answers; memorizing details is of far less value then knowing which manpage to reference. Online resources include manuals, mailing lists, newsgroups and archives of both, FAQs and so on. Being able to use search engines (for example, see: http://www.google.com/ ) is useful as well to effeciently locate documents.
If you are considering this course, I recommend that you have a good understanding and working knowledge of Un*x operating system concepts. This includes being able to use your shell environment as well as edit text files (hopefully with vi :).
I plan on assigning readings, to be read before each class. There could be a short quiz each week that covers the material in the readings :); and/or homeworks. Most of the readings are actually just on-line manual pages (they're very exciting).
There will be a midterm and a final exam, both written.
The class will be divided in up to ten groups, each with five or six students. Each group will be responsible for setting up a small set of machines. Further details about this on-going hardware project will be given in class.
Finally, there will be a hardware installation workshop that will take place outside of class. (see: Hardware Installation Workshop)
Weighting of various assignments will probably look something like this:
subscribe csci4113 [email address optional]
Please additionally send me mail personally and let me know if you are enrolled or waitlisted. If you are inclined, please also write why you are interested in taking this class as well as any particular things you might want to have covered. If you want to know more about majordomo right now, see: http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/
For these notes as well as others to be posted through out the semester, please see: ./index
The workshop will take place at some other time than the class itself. There are some constraints, in that there may be a need for four or more hours of work involved, and not all folks' schedules will match up well. The nature of the workshop is also such that smaller groups are preferable.
The plan is that two groups (10 - 12 people) will meet at a time; the times might be 10AM - 1PM and 2PM-5PM on Saturday and Sunday (perhaps the 27th/28th of Januarys as well as the 3rd/4th of February?). Additional times will be add if necessary.
During the workshop you will go through the entire installation procedure for getting OpenBSD running on either Sparc or PC hardware. For those who haven't, you will open up the machine and get to know all of its parts. You will finish the configuration of the machine by getting X windows running (maybe!) and getting it to interact happily on the network.
Each student will get accounts on the following gateway machine:
dwarf % grep saclass /etc/hosts
128.138.192.13 saclass.cs.colorado.edu saclass-1 sa-bsd-sparc
Other machines will be accessible on a private LAN that is only
reachable from saclass.cs.colorado.edu.
The /etc/hosts file for CS dept. machines contains only cs.colorado.edu hosts; if it included all of campus it would be 2.5 Meg and around 30,000 entries! The hosts file gives you several bits of info (and I actually deleted some, you can look at the file yourself to see). First is the IP address of the machine, second is the canonical name of the machine in a format known as fully qualified . The remaining names in an entry are aliases by which the machine is known. These are called CNAMEs and we'll discuss them when we talk about DNS (the Domain Name Service) during the Networking weeks.
Notice, from the alias I gave to each machine, that there will be two PC-style machines and two Sun Sparc-style machines. One of each will be running OpenBSD 2.6 and RedHat 6.1 Linux respectively. You've probably figured out by now that saclass-1 is a Sparc running OpenBSD, right?
You should also note that these machines are basically "out of the box" installations of the respective operating systems. They are also on an isolated subnet, meaning you don't have access to nice things like your /home/cia/$user homedir or the /tools/ trees that you might be used to on other CS machines.
For more information about OpenBSD, see: http://www.openbsd.org/ . For another good BSD site, see: http://www.freebsd.org . For information about RedHat see: http://www.redhat.com/ . There is lots of information about linux at a number of sites. A good place to start is the Linux Documentation Project see: http://www.linuxdoc.org/ . For the Linux HowTo doc, see: http://www.linuxdoc.org/docs.html#howto .
There are no textbooks required for this course. Pretty much any information you really need as a System Administrator is online. I can not stress enough how important it is to read the manual pages associated with software you are trying to install, configure or just use.
However, hardcopy reference works can be invaluable. Here are some that I like: