Comprehensive System Administration

Lecture 1 notes:

getting an OCF account:
	This course will be taught on the Open Computing Facility's hardware.
	If you don't have an OCF account already, you'll need to sign up for one.

	You should do this on the first day of class, but if you missed this
	chance, you can do it anytime a staff member is around.
	You can go to this page to get the new account form 
	if you'd rather print it and fill it out at home although we usually 
	have copies in the lab).

administrivia:
	Class time: 12-1pm Fridays
	Location:   OCF Lab in Heller Lounge, MLK Student Union

	Units:  variable 

	Grading:  
		To be taken on a P/NP basis.
		There will assignments every week. 

	Questions?	
		calman@ocf.berkeley.edu
		drew@ocf.berkeley.edu
background material:
	What is "Unix"?  - by calman
		history of unix - more history
		unix today
			-internet infrastructure
				-web, email and other 'servers'
				-routing
	
	What is "System Administration"?

	Why do system administration?
		-interesting, fun
		-community
		-helping people
		-flexible hours
		-demand and stability
		-pay

	Why not do system administration?
		-male dominated (this is changing!)
		-geeky image
		-on call/strange or inconsistant hours (firefighting)

	How to learn this stuff?
		-degree programs/classes?
		-mentorship and peergroups (at Cal- OCF, CSUA, ResComp, WS&T...)
		-online and offline sources
			-man pages
			-books
			-howtos
			-google
		-experience



	Very basic unix commands...





ls

cp, mv, rm
chmod, chown, chgrp

cd, pwd
mkdir, rmdir

cat, more, less, head, tail

man, apropos

sort, uniq, wc, grep

vi, pico, emacs

date, cal

pine, elm, mutt, mail

telnet, rlogin, ssh

ftp, scp

w, who, finger, talk, nwrite

hostname, whoami, set

passwd, quota -v, du

lpr, lp

ps, kill

find, locate, which

exit

redirection >, >>, <, |

 >  send output to file:  ls > directory-listing
 >>  append output to end of file (don't overwrite file)
 < send a file as input to a command:   mail friend < filename
 |  send output of one command to input of next command: ls -la | more







Homework
 

0)  Don't worry if this doesn't make sense yet, we'll cover the basic commands in the
second lecture.

1)  Create a transcript that shows you understand several of the commands listed above.
Several people have asked, "what is a transcript?"  By transcript, I mean a file that 
shows the output of your session.  See this example.
Yours will be longer.  You can use the script command to create the transcript, 
or you can cut and paste, whatever works for you.

Don't bother demonstrating knowledge of editors, mail readers, or remote access programs, 
we'll get into more details on those later, if possible, and besides, that will make your
transcript look crufty.
Don't print anything.  
Use flags (options, i.e. "-l" is an option for ls, as in ls -l. 
Do demonstrate the use of input/output redirection.

2) Find another source of interesting or useful information, 
such as the sites and books listed below.  
Google.com's search engine could be useful for this. 
Tell us what the source is, and describe the source briefly.

i.e.

www.sunfreeware.com - it has software packages for various sun operating systems.
or
www.slashdot.org - has news and information about computing and technology

Mail your homework, and any questions to jones@xcf.berkeley.edu

Enrichment

W&MF walk-in courses
A semester in a table from WM&F

CSUA Help Sessions
Help Session Tutorials and Handouts
Online help files from the ME dept

Classes offered by Berkeley's IS&T staff
Help files on Socrates

Computer-Based Training in Management of Information Science (available from UCB hosts only)

If you are interested in running Linux at home, you should visit CalLUG the Cal Linux Users Group.
They have meetings, and links to information about running Linux.

An independent study course from the University of Indiana

A brief description of different Linux distributions

Unix FAQFrequently Asked Questions from the comp.unix.questions newsgroup

Unix Sysadm Resources - another random source

My favorite general-purpose book is Unix System Administration Handbook by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass and Hein. Now in it's third edition, this book provides excellent coverage of many routine system administration tasks. For deeper understanding of a variety of topics, O'Reilly & Associates is my favorite publisher. Their books are nearly always high quality, and are usually written by reputable sources, and occasionally by the actual creators of a tool. For example, the most famous book on Perl is published by O'Reilly and is called Programming Perl was written by Larry Wall, the creator of Perl.

The field of unix system administration really does have it's own culture. Being very computer-centric, there are countless newsgroups, email-lists, irc-channels, and websites dedicated to the task and the surrounding culture. This culture does have it's egos and social-ills, but by and large is very supportive and genial.

The System Administrator's Guild - SAGE, a professional organization for SysAdmins
Slashdot - news of interest to the geek community
User Friendly - a comic about a software company
Cyberspace Atlas - interesting information with a cheesy name