UNIX System Administration

Course Contents - DAY 1Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

• Role of a System Administrator
• Using the root login
• Using and tracking the use of su
• The sysadm menu system

• 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

• 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

• Starting background Jobs (&)
• Using the nice command
• Using cron processes
• Creating crontab entries
• Using the crontab command
• The at command
• Exercise

• 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

• File access criteria - users, groups and permissions
• Default permissions with umask
• Changing file attributes with chmod, chown and chgrp
• Testing permissions with su
• Exercise

• Using the cpio command
• Using the tar command
• Using the dd command
• Backup and restore services
• Exercise

• Listing, configuring and disabling swap space (swap)
• Exercise

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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)

• Operating system installation
• Other software installation (pkginfo, pkgadd, pkgrm)
• Exercise

• 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

• Managing files and directories
• Checking file space used
• Freeing up disk space
• Saving disk space
• File system organisation
• Helpful hints
• Exercise