Course Syllabus
Unix System Administration

A short module covering basic administration of a Unix system. This course is designed to cover stand-alone Unix systems only. The administration of networked systems is covered in another course. The course is generic and covers both the System V and BSD versions of Unix without becoming specific to a particular ‘brand’ of Unix (eg. HP-UX). The course is most often run either on PCs running Linux or Suns running Solaris.

 

* System Administration	- Overview, Responsibilities
	- The Super User Account
	- Window-based Administration Tools
* Managing Users	- The password and group files
	- The passwd command
* Further Unix features	- Links to files, hard & symbolic links
	- Access bits (SetUID, SetGID, Sticky)
	- Umask operation
* Processes	- Overview, listing with ps, killing with kill
* Startup and Shutdown	- BSD & System V Startup, Run Levels
	- The inittab & gettydefs files
	- System Shutdown
* Clocks	- Dates, Times and Time zones
	- The cron clock daemon
* Printers	- Overview
	- Local Printers on BSD Unix
	- Remote printing with BSD Unix
	- System V Print Sub-system
* Disks and File Systems	- Partitioning, mounting
	- Unix File Systems, structure
	- checking with fsck, df, quot
	- Backing up with tar, cpio
	- Installing software

 

Notes

1. All participants receive comprehensive lecture notes.
2. Basic Unix experience (such as our Using Unix Course) is a pre-requisite.
3. The Course is generic and not tied to any particular version of Unix.
4. The course includes practical ‘hands-on’ work.
5. Ideally, each student should have a Unix System to work on.
6. The length of the Course is normally 2 days.