Develop the skills to effectively administer a UNIX/Linux system.

Print Outline in PDF format

Course Description:

UNIX/Linux System Administration is a class for new UNIX/Linux administrators. Students will be provided with an introduction to the fundamental issues, tasks, tools and strategies in administering most versions and variants of the UNIX/Linux operating system.

Participants will learn:

• UNIX/Linux system administration overview

• UNIX/Linux filesystem organization, System administration files and commands

• User, Process, and Print system administration

• Filesystem and storage management, Backup and restore

• Scheduling jobs with at and cron, System startup and shutdown, Performance monitoring and tuning

• Securing UNIX/Linux systems, Devices and filesystems

• The X Window system

• Network administration tools and topics

• Error messages and troubleshooting

Who Needs to Attend:

Technical personnel who have responsibility for installing, operating, administering or managing a UNIX/Linux system. Technical support staff, programmers, software developers and project managers will all benefit.

Prerequisites:

UNIX/Linux Introduction or equivalent experience. UNIX/Linux Shell Programming recommended but not required. Participants should have familiarity with UNIX/Linux commands, directory structure and a text editor.

Lab Exercises:

As appropriate for each section.

Course Content:

SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

UNIX/Linux operating system features

• Multiuser and multitasking, Hierarchical file system

• User-selectable command language, Graphical user interfaces based on X

• Network communication services, Highly portable kernel and utilities

Present versions

• System V Release 4, BSD 4.4, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, UNIX/Linux, Others

The Open Group standards

SECTION 2 - GETTING STARTED WITH UNIX/Linux

Logging in and using the system

• User names and passwords

• Graphical interfaces vs. text interfaces, Command-line syntax: commands, arguments, whitespace, options

• Accessing and searching the online reference manual using man

Common Desktop Environment

• Front panel and workspace window, Window controls, Workspace menu, OpenWindows, KDE, GNOME

CDE applications

• Terminal emulator, Text editor, File manager, Style manager, Trash can, Help viewer

SECTION 3 – THE UNIX/Linux FILE SYSTEM

Manipulating files

• Copying, moving, linking, removing, Remote file copy and display

• File attributes, The vi editor, Controlling access, Comparing, printing

The directory hierarchy

• Root, current and home directories, Creating and removing directories, Finding files, Devise special files

SECTION 4 - THE KORN SHELL

Basic features

• Displaying and using command history; Background jobs; Process status

• Filename "wildcards", Substitutions, Redirection and pipes

Advanced features

• Metacharacter suppression, Variables, Environment variables, Aliases, Startup files

SECTION 5 - FILTERS AND PIPELINES

Concepts and basic filters

• Tool-building philosophy

• Input, output and error streams

• sort: sorting, cat: catenating, grep: searching for patterns, wc: counting, tail: trimming sed: stream editing, awk: field processing

Using regular expressions

• egrep: extended grep Searches & substitutions using sed and vi

Advanced filters

SECTION 6 - REMOTE ACCESS TOOLS

UNIX/Linux-to-UNIX/Linux

• rlogin: remote login, rcp: remote copy, rsh: remote shell

UNIX/Linux-to-any

• telnet: remote login, ftp: remote copy, Sending mail with mail/mailx

SECTION 7 - SHELL PROGRAMMING

Shell scripts in executable files

• Ordinary and special variables, Subshells and exit codes

Loops, decisions and I/O

• for and while loops, test, if/else and case decisions , Reading user input with read, Filtering loop and decision I/O, Redirecting error messages to files

Acting as the super-user

• Managing users and groups, System initialization: init process, System shutdown: shutdown command

• Daemon processes, cron

• Backup/restore with tar and cpio

• Accessing local and remote file systems

X Window System concepts

• Windows, text and graphics, Window managers, X server and client applications

• Network and vendor independence

• Options: geometry, display, others; The DISPLAY environment variables