COMPUTER AND NETWORK
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
CIS 5406-01
Summer 1996 - Lesson 01

Lesson 1
(last revision date - 5/6/96)

Introduction

   Attempt to provide a practical hands-on approach
     to SA within limitations
   Lot of expertise in class (more than me)
   Everyone is an expert in the areas in which they have
     had crises
   SA work is collaborative more than competitive - will 
     always depend on others
   Hopefully, this course will fill in gaps of missing knowledge
   Emphasis is curently on UNIX
   Will attempt to give exposure to non-UNIX environments

 State of System Administration as a profession

   Journals

     Journal of Network and Systems Management [JNSM]

       (See http://www.cstp.umkc.edu/jnsm/home.html)

   Conferences

     USENIX/LISA

       (See http://www.usenix.org)

     IEEE 1st Int. Workshop on Systems Management (April 1993)

   Professional organizations - SAGE

     (See http://www.usenix.org/sage)
     Review USENIX skills questionnaire

   David Jones's SysAdmin class:
   
   http://mc.cqu.edu.au/subjects/85321/index.html
   

     UNIX Differences document
     Humorous: Known Your UNIX System Adminstrator
     Sysadmin Professional Issues - excellent list of Sysadmin sources

 Syllabus

   Additional book resources

     
     http://www.admin.com
     
     Printing corrections from Web pages
     Nifty Reference Guide from Web page

 Introduction to UNIX

   I won't bore you with the standard history of UNIX (which is now
       25 years old)
   I want to emphasize several points
   Point one, recall that UNIX was initally a simplification of MULTICS,
     not a new creation
   Point two, some of the operating system's greatest strengths
     arose because of the  collaborative nature  of its development
   Other operatings systems in the 60's were products of a manufacturer
     with hardware to sell
   Each hardware platform had its own proprietary operating system
   Rather than being a  product of a manufacturer with hardware to
     sell UNIX was a collaborative effort with the following goals:

     Simplicity (so it would run on small machines)
     Multi-user support (UNIX was originally developed under
       the ruse of designing a multiuser text processing system)
     Portability (made possible by the creation of the C programming
       language)

   In addition, AT&T required that if they were going to allow
     their engineers to share UNIX with others that there would be:

     No support
     No bug fixes
     No credit

   The end-result of the AT&T directive was true non-competitive
     collaboration
   Universities could get entire source code for practically nothing.
   Users shared ideas, program modifications, bug fixes
   The development of early UNIX was user-driven rather than
     corporate-driven
   The first meeting of the Unix User Group was held in May of 1974
   This group would later become the Usenix Association

 Introduction to Linux

   Linux is a complete UNIX-compatible operating system
   www.linux.org, for example
   Runs on any PC clone, DEC Alphas, and soon on PowerPCs
   It is based on a kernel written by a Finnish student named Linus 
     Torvalds
   It includes a programming environment, set of libraries, X-windows,
     NFS, multimedia support, spreadsheets, C, C++, FORTRAN, Smalltalk,
     Forth, Modula-2, SLIP, PPP, etc...
   and importantly, it includes source code
   It is mostly POSIX.1 compliant
   It exists in MANY incarnations (Slackware, Red Hat, Yggdrasil, Debian, etc.)
     
     See http://www.ssc.com/linux/web.html  for a good Linux ref site
   Why use Linux for this course?
   It is certainly not the first UNIX for PC's (XENIX)
   It is not the only UNIX-like OS with source code available
     (Minix, NetBSD, FreeBSD) 
   It is because it is a return to UNIX's roots
   The entire OS was developed by volunteers from many different
     countries
   It operates under the same General Public License as GNU
     software put out by the Free Software Foundation
   Anyone can get the source off of the net
   The critical licensing element is: any enhancements to the
     code also come under the license
   DEC can't steal it modify it and then sell it
   all future enhancements will be shared freely
   You are not required to use Linux for this course
   You will need some UNIX box on which you can become root
     and can experiment 
   Don't let it be the departmental mail server when we study sendmail.conf

 Lab Machines

   66MHz 486, SVGA, 3C505 ethernet
   Genoa 8500 VGA cards
   disk space (96 M + swap)
   sharing with DOS users
   memory (most all 16M)

 Review handout 1 (Installing Linux on Your Lab PC)

 Review handout 2 (Security and Courtesy for Root Users)

 Assignment of machines

   Finite number of machines available to run Linux on
     the Majors lab.
   For those installing Linux at home, I will have a CD-ROM
     available for check-out.  Or, you can grab a lot of
     floppies and copy them off of the network from one of
     the PCs in the Majors lab.

 Linux assignment

   get it up and running!

 Reading assignment - review "man" pages 
   for the following daemons:

   inetd, init, cron, portmap, update(8), lpd,
     sendmail, nfsd, mountd, lockd, statd, ypbind,
     ypserv, ftpd, rlogind, telnetd, rshd, named,
     syslogd, fingerd, httpd, tftpd, rarpd, bootparamd.
   Read Chs. 1 and 31.