S5

UNIX System Administration Course 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.

Skills Gained

The delegates will practise:

• Adding, changing and deleting users and user groups
• Managing user passwords
• Configuring login files
• Running background tasks at regular intervals
• Creating file systems
• Mounting, monitoring and repairing file systems
• Managing file access
• Backing up and restoring files and directories using standard utilities
• Managing swap space
• Adding printers to the system
• Monitoring and controlling print jobs
• Starting and shutting down the system
• Customising start-up and shutdown procedures
• Monitoring system performance with the sar utility
• Configuring syslog to manage system event messages
• Carrying out various housekeeping procedures to manage disk space

Who will the Course Benefit?

IT staff responsible for the maintenance and day-to-day running of a SVR4 compatible UNIX system.  Typically, where several different versions of UNIX systems are supported and the delegate needs knowledge of administration procedures common to all that adhere to SVR4 standards.

The UNIX System Administration course assumes knowledge of the Unix Operating System to the level covered in the Introduction to Unix Course.  Some unix shell programming experience may also prove advantageous; this can be gained on the Unix Shell Programming Course.

Course Objectives

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

Requirements

Shell Programming is beneficial but not essential.

Pre-Requisite Courses

• UNIX Introduction
• UNIX Shell Programming

Follow-On Courses

• UNIX Advanced Shell Programming Tools
• Oracle SQL
• TCP/IP Networking
• Apache Web Server

NOTE: Course technical content is subject to change without notice.

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UNIX System Administration Training Course

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

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UNIX System Administration Training Course

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

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UNIX System Administration Training Course

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

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UNIX System Administration Training Course

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

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UNIX System Administration Training Course

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