Unix: Administration

Course Overview

With the increased proliferation of UNIX systems, knowledgeable and experienced administrators who can support them are in high demand. This course introduces UNIX system management and gives a thorough grounding in the essential UNIX operating model.

You acquire the skills and knowledge you need to successfully manage the UNIX operating system. You learn to install and configure system and application software, provide and exploit UNIX-based network resources, establish a working environment that is convenient for users, and increase productivity with automation and scripting.

Audience

This course is valuable for those installing, administering, supporting or integrating UNIX systems. Course 428, " UNIX Introduction ", or recent experience with UNIX is assumed.

Skills Gained

• Install and configure a UNIX system
• Maintain and monitor file systems
• Add, remove and configure user accounts
• Deploy standard and third-party UNIX software
• Create personal and system backups
• Monitor and troubleshoot system performance
• Implement file, printer and network services

Course Outline

Installing UNIX

Local disk systems

• Installing standalone UNIX
• Disk partitioning
• Disk naming-physical vs. logical

UNIX memory

• Virtual memory: paging and swapping
• Increasing swap space

Booting UNIX

• Boot files: BSD and SVR4
• initand inittab
• Starting system services: Daemons
• Customising system start-up

Maintaining File Systems

Re-sizing a file system

• Repartitioning a drive
• Creating a new file system with newfs
• Establishing and extending logical volumes

Building the virtual file system

• Examining file system types UNIX, CD-ROM, JFS, UDF and DOS
• Mounting local and remote file systems
• Configuring permanent mounts
• Listing inodes and superblocks

Monitoring and automating the file system

• Consistency checking with fsck
• Invoking the automounter

Managing UNIX User Accounts

Creating users

• Defining the superuser: su
• Configuring user account databases
• Adding and deleting users with useraddand usermod
• Developing user login and other start-up files

Simple shell scripting

• Making use of argument variables
• Conditional statements: if/then/else
• Automating system administration

Providing Local System Services

The X window system

• Invoking different window managers
• Investigating tools to integrate UNIX and Microsoft Windows
• Configuring X access control

Establishing print services

• BSD: printcap
• SVR4: lpadmin
• Setting up a print server

Adding Software and Backups

System backup and recovery

• Utilising the dump and restore commands
• Taking a snapshot of file systems
• Backing up and recovering snapshot data
• Manipulating tararchives

Automating system services

• Scheduling events with cron
• Executing jobs with at

Installing application software

• Comparing distribution formats
• Adding and removing packages
• Examining compression tools

Implementing Security

Secure logins

• Implementing a password policy
• Setting password aging

Disabling remote services

• Turning off unnecessary services
• Disabling remote X server access

Monitoring System Performance

Disk, CPU and memory usage

• Checking disk usage with dfand du
• Listing processes with ATT and BSD ps
• Virtual memory statistics

Kernel Configuration

• BSD and SVR4 configuration files
• Dynamic kernel configuration

UNIX Networking

Connecting to Ethernet

• Internet addresses
• Remote commands: rcp, rsh, rlogin
• Secure shell: ssh
• Resolving hostnames with DNS

File system, directory and print sharing

• Constructing an LDAP client
• Sharing a file system with NFS
• Exploiting remote print services

Follow On Courses

• UNIX and Linux Security
• UNIX and Linux Tools and Utilities
• Perl Programming Introduction
• Linux Administration and Support
• System and Network Security Introduction
• Linux Comprehensive Introduction
• Disaster Recovery Planning