CS 469 Unix/Linux Administration and Networking

Catalog Description

Includes installation and configuration of Unix/Linux operating system software; set-up of hardware and software for Unix/Linux networking including TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, DNS, DHCP, and Apache; Unix/Linux administration tasks including directories, users, tuning, backup, security, and networking. Prerequisite - C or better in CS 201.

Prerequisites

Basic Unix skills, some prior programming experience

Standard Content

Course Outline

• Wild-cards and regular expressions
• Files and directories:
• The file-system tree, path traversal, links
• Unix permissions and ACLs
• The FHS standard: where things go in the file-system
• Bash scripting
• Invocation and startup, job control
• Command lists, pipelines, redirection
• Positional parameters and special variables, data types, the environment
• Functions, variable scope
• Conditionals and loops
• Bash built-ins: read, printf, alias, etc
• The core-utilities: sed, col, grep, tr, basename, dirname, etc.
• Processes and threads:
• Attributes of processes: understanding ps,top, etc output
• /proc filesystem
• Signals
• Resource limits
• Memory layout: security issues: buffer overflows, ASLR
• Libraries
• The boot process: boot loaders, the kernel, init, runlevels, init scripts
• Disks: Block devices, partitioning, making file-systems, mounting/unmounting them, checking them, configuring fstab
• Swap and virtual memory
• RAID: levels, MD devices and mdadm
• Basic MySQL administration: DB and user administration and backing up/archiving databases
• Common Administrative tasks:
• User/group administration
• Log files, accounting files and reporting
• Quotas
• Networking:
• SSH and related tools for key generation and management, scp, rsync
• Various networking terms / OSI model
• SSL/TLS certificates (openssl), creating signed certificates, setting up a CA purpose of certs, anatomy of a cert
• IPv4 networking: Packets, Ethernet, ARP, DNS, CIDR, basic routing
• The Linux Firewall (iptables) (time permitting)

Learning Outcomes

• Comprehensive overview of command line tools used by a system administrator
• More advanced bash scripting
• Ability to install and configure a Linux system
• Some Virtual Machine experience

Important Assignments and/or Exam Questions

• Various man page reading assignments
• Bash scripts: iterate over command line parameters and do something with them, find the largest file in a directory tree, etc.
• Create a Virtual Machine and install Linux onto it.
• Root administration tasks on a provided VM:
• Setup and configure accounts
• Setup and configure services: http and mysql
• Install and web service(s) requiring a working web server and mysql instance
• Create a certificate authority and sign other students cert requests

Standard resources

• The Unix man pages
• Tutorials Point