
UNIX System Administration
Overview
This Unix System Administration training course is designed to give delegates practical experience in the administration of a SVR4 compatible Unix System. Practical work will concentrate on the basic SVR4 unix commands rather than vendor-specific administration menu driven or GUI tools.
Prerequisites
Shell Programming is beneficial but not essential.
Objectives
To provide the knowledge and skills needed to maintain successful day-to-day operation of a UNIX system.
Outline
Course Contents - DAY 1
Course Introduction
- Administration and Course Materials
- Course Structure and Agenda
- Delegate and Trainer Introductions
Session 1: THE ADMINISTRATOR'S ROLE
- Role of a System Administrator
- Using the root login
- Using and tracking the use of su
- The sysadm menu system
Session 2: 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
Session 3: 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
Course Contents - DAY 2
Session 4: BACKGROUND JOBS
- Starting background Jobs (&)
- Using the nice command
- Using cron processes
- Creating crontab entries
- Using the crontab command
- The at command
- Exercise
Session 5: FILE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
- Physical disk organisation
- UNIX partition slices
- File system device names
- File system types
- File system structure
- File system creation (mkfs)
- Mounting and unmounting file systems (mount, umount)
- Checking and repairing file systems (fsck)
- Monitoring free space (df)
- Exercise
Session 6: 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
Course Contents - DAY 3
Session 7: BACKUP AND RESTORE FACILITIES
- Using the cpio command
- Using the tar command
- Using the dd command
- Backup and restore services
- Exercise
Session 8: MANAGING SWAP SPACE
- Listing, configuring and disabling swap space (swap)
- Exercise
Session 9: 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
Course Contents - DAY 4
Session 10: 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 (init, shutdown)
- Recovery from boot failure
- Exercise
Session 11: 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
Session 12: 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
Course Contents - DAY 5
Session 13: 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)
Session 14: SOFTWARE INSTALLATION
- Operating system installation
- Other software installation (pkginfo, pkgadd, pkgrm)
- Exercise
Session 15: SYSLOG
- Syslog configuration
- The /etc/syslog.conf configuration file
- Editing the syslog.conf file
- Logging telnet, ftp and other network daemons
- Testing syslog logging (logger)
- Exercise
Session 16: GENERAL HOUSEKEEPING
- Managing files and directories
- Checking file space used
- Freeing up disk space
- Saving disk space
- File system organisation
- Helpful hints
- Exercise