Class overview :

Class goals :

To provide the knowledge and skills needed to maintain successful day-to-day operation of a UNIX system.

Content of Unix System Administration

The Administrator’s Role

• Role Of A System Administrator
• Using The root Login
• Tracking The Use Of su
• The sysadm Menu System

Account Management

• Users, user groups and related system files
• Adding new users and user groups (useradd, groupadd)
• Changing and deleting users and user groups (usermod, userdel, groupmod, groupdel)
• Password and login control (passwd)
• User communication facilites (wall, /etc/motd)
• Exercise

Login Files

• The Bourne and Korn Shell Environments
• Environment Variables
• The system profile /etc/profile
• The user’s .profile
• The Korn shell start up file .kshrc
• Korn shell options
• Listing environment variables and aliases
• Skeleton directories
• Exercise

Background Jobs

• Starting Background Jobs
• Using The nice Command
• Using cron Processes
• Creating crontab Entries
• Using The crontab Command
• The at Command
• Exercise

File System Administration

• Physical Disk Organisation
• UNIX Partition Slices
• File System Device Names
• Mounting and Unmounting File Systems
• File System Types
• File System Structure
• File System Creation
• Checking And Repairing File Systems
• Monitoring Free Space
• Exercise

File Access

• File Access Criteria (Users, Groups and Permissions)
• Default permissions with umask
• Changing File Attributes with chmod, chown and chgrp
• Testing permissions with su
• Exercise

Backup and Restore Facilities

• Using The cpio Command
• Using The tar Command
• Using the dd Command
• Backup And Restore Services

Managing Swap Space

• Listing, configuring and disabling swap space (swap)
• Exercise

Terminals and Printers

• Managing terminals
• Using the stty command
• Terminal model capabilities and commands (infocmp, tput)
• The LP print service
• LP print service files
• Printer configuration (lpadmin)
• Printer maintenance – managing printer status, job queues etc.
• (lphsut, lpsched, /etc/init.d/lp, accept, reject, enable, disable, lpmove, lpusers, lpstat, cancel)
• Printing from copies of files
• Stopping banner output
• Exercise

System Startup and Shutdown

• The /etc/init Procedure
• System Run States
• The /etc/inittab File
• System Startup Procedures and Processes
• System Shutdown Procedures and Processes
• Recovery From Boot Failure
• Exercise

Basic Networking

• Basic networking overview
• Network hardware
• Network software
• Network addressing – IPv4
• Network masks and subnets
• Routing
• Network commands (hostname, ifconfig, netstat, telnet, rlogin, ssh, ftp, sftp, rcp, scp, rsh, ping)
• Client-Server environment
• Servers
• Networking services overview NIS, NIS+, DNS, LDAP NFS, DHCP
• Exercise

Performance Management

• Performance Management
• System Performance Tools
• System Activity Reporting using the sar command
• General Performance
• Specific Areas Of Performance
• Excessive Paging
• Disk I/O Performance
• CPU Performance
• Using the timex Command
• Exercise

Kernel Configuration

• System Configuration
• Configuration Guidelines
• Reducing Disk I/O
• Increasing User Memory
• Improving CPU Performance
• Special Case Tuning Needs
• The Configuration Process (/etc/conf/cf.d, idtune, idbuild)

Software Installation

• Operating System Installation
• Other Software Installation (pkginfo, pkgadd, pkgrm)
• Exercise

Syslog

• Syslog Configuration
• The /etc/syslog.conf configuration file
• Editing the syslog.conf file
• Logging telnet, ftp and other network daemons
• Testing syslog logging
• Exercise

General Housekeeping

• Managing Files and Directories
• Checking file space used
• Freeing up disk space
• Saving disk space
• File system organisation
• Helpful hints
• Exercise