Class Outline--UNIX System Administration

The following is a tenative outline of topics covered in this class. Some topics may be added at the demand of the students.

The readings are chapters in UNIX System Administration Handbook, by Nemeth, Snyder and Seebass.

• Class administrivia
  Course description, syllabus, supplemental reading packet
  Oh, and of course, the pre-test.
• What is System Administration?
  Chapters 1 and 32, What do System Administrators Really Do? By Rob Kolstad, 1992 LISA Time Expenditure Survey By Rob Kolstad, What Does It Take to be a System Administrator?, Top 10 Tasks for a new Site Admin, Simmons' Laws of System Administration By Steve Simmons, System Administration Tools Your Vendor Never Told You About: The Logbook By Steve Simmons, Communication: An Important Aspect of UNIX System Administration By Bjorn Satdeva.
  Further information/references:
  The Life of a SysAdmin (a more cynical view), Unix is a Four Letter Word, Unix Haters Handbook, The Worst Job in the World, Know your sysadmin!, The Hacker Test, Top 100 things you don't want the sysadmin to say.
• Versions of UNIX, History, Philosophy
  Further information/references:
  Linux, General UNIX FAQ, Sun sysadmin FAQ, The Loginataka, comp.society.folklore FAQ, The Tao Of Programming The GNU Project. Dilbert
• Information resources
  Chapters 20 and 24 (skip parts about setting up software)
  Further information/references:
  Yahoo is a great index of WWW links. Of course, FAQs come in very handy. If you want to learn HTML (it's not hard, really) check out this introduction to HTML
• SysAdmin tools/Shell Programming/Perl
  For these lectures I use slides that I prepared years ago for Sysgroup Workshops (although there isn't time to do a thorough job). They were written using a custom troff macro package, so conversion to html would not be a simple task. The Shell Programming slides are available in postscript or ascii and the Perl slides are also available in postscript or ascii.

  Further information/references:
  Mail FAQs, Shell programming FAQ.

  The best books on Perl (IMHO) are Learning Perl and Programming Perl. There are also a myriad of online Perl resources, the Perl Web page at Metronet is a good place to start.

  How to find sources on the net. Some people also find Tcl useful for writing tools.

• Booting/shutdown
  Chapter 2. Here is a transcript of Jove booting, Anyone want to transcribe a Linux boot?
• Root permissions
  Chapter 3
• File-systems
  Chapter 4 and 26 (up to p. 622)

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• Process structure
  Chapter 5
• Accounts/new users/startup files
  Chapter 6

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• Periodic Processes/Daemons
  Chapter 10 and 31 (up to p. 712)
• Devices
  Chapter 7
• Kernel Config (not in-depth)
  Chapter 13
• Backups
  Chapter 11

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• Terminals & modems
  Chapter 8
• Printers
  Chapter 25 (focus on BSD spooler, skim the rest)

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• Disks/filesystems
  Chapter 9
• TCP/IP
  Chapter 14, 22 and of course, at this point, TCP/IP Network Administration would be relevant, as would the Network Info FAQs and Internet RFCs
  I won't talk about network hardware (chapter 15) much at all. Ethernet FAQ

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• NFS
  Chapter 17
  Further information:
  Managing NFS and NIS
• Managing distributed information
  Chapter 16, 18
  Further information:
  
• Mail/Sendmail
  Chapter 21
  Further information:
  This is a very complex issue, so much so that there is a book on just sendmail. Mail FAQs
• Security
  Chapter 23, The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis By Gene Spafford Coping with the Threat of Computer Security Incidents A Primer from Prevention through Recovery By Russel Brand Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into It By Dan Farmer, Wietse Venema Improving the Security of You UNIX System By David Curry
  Further information:
  There is tons of info out there on this subject, including many books including: Computer Security Basics and Practical UNIX Security. Computer Security FAQ Internet spoofing reference page CLM Security page Uebercracker Security Info Security info Security docs The Worm Before Christmas

The following topics generally do not get covered due to lack of time.

• Hardware maintenance
  Chapter 27
  Some bits of this will be covered elsewhere.
• System Performance
  Chapter 29.
  Further information:
  The book System Performance Tuning gives an in-depth treatment of this subject.
• UUCP
  Chapter 30
  Further information:
  UUCP Internals FAQ
• News
  Chapter 24
  Further information:
  USENET FAQs How to become a USENET site
• Accounting
  Chapter 28