kolstad@rmtc.Central.Sun.COM (Rob Kolstad) (04/02/91)
Evi Nemeth and I (Rob Kolstad) are teaching a four-day system administration course at the UCLA extension school. The four day course runs from April 29-May 2 and is held adjacent to the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. Cost is $1195. Contact information is at the end of this note. Hundreds of transparencies, over a dozen valuable appendices, and a copy of Evi's system administration book provide the material for this course. Here's the course information and outline: Unix System Administration April 29 - May 1, 1991 OVERVIEW This course provides a comprehensive overview of UNIX system ad- ministration. While many of the issues raised and techniques presented are applicable to any version of UNIX, we admit to a Berkeley bias. The course has been divided into three broad areas: philosophy and policy, every day chores, and advanced techniques. The target environment assumed is medium sized (tens to hundreds of machines); procedures covered may be overkill for a single machine with only a few users and may not scale to a network containing thousands of machines. Participants should have at least one year of experience using the UNIX system. Experience programming in either C, awk, or the shell is helpful but not required. Use of regular expressions will ease understanding in some sections. System administrators with a few months to a few year's experience will benefit from this course. COURSE MATERIALS Extensive course notes that include not only a copy of each over- head slide presented but also extensive appendices and reference guides. Also, Unix System Administration Handbook, Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass (Prentice Hall 1989). LECTURER: Evi Nemeth, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Nemeth in addition to her faculty duties is the coordinator of the system administration group for the Computer Science Department research network of Unix machines. She has shepherded this network from a single Vax 11/780 ten years ago, to its present complement of about 80 machines, train- ing many undergraduates in system administration along the way. Dr. Nemeth has authored several articles on various aspects of computer science and is a coauthor of the course text. She is on the board of directors of the Usenix Association and is a member of the ACM and IEEE. LECTURER: Rob Kolstad, Ph.D. Dr. Rob Kolstad is a Software Manager at Sun Microsystems at the Rocky Mountain Technology Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His current charter involves developing software that will ex- ploit high speed servers and enable them to meet customers' ex- pectations of ever-increasing performance and functionality. Previously Rob was Vice-President of Software at Prisma, Inc. Administrators Workshop. Before moving to Colorado, he was Com- puter Systems Manager at CONVEX Computer Corporation in Richard- son, Texas where he oversaw operations of dozens of mini- supercomputers and workstations. Rob is secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors and sponsored the first USENIX System Administrator's Workshop. He is a contributing editor to UNIX Review and a member of the editorial committee for Computing Sys- tems, the USENIX journal. He has taught many USENIX tutorials in the pragmatic use of UNIX. DAILY SCHEDULE Monday Morning: Overview of System Administration --- Introduction The four-day seminar starts with a 15 minute overview and roadmap of the topics to be covered and how they relate to UNIX system management. --- History, documentation, philosophy and roles A brief 10 minute tour of UNIX's history leads to signifi- cant understandings of the derivation of some of its tech- niques. A roadmap of UNIX documentation and the keys to reading it are also important and segue into a discussion of the philosophy of UNIX and roles of UNIX system administra- tors. --- UNIX Processes UNIX is a process and filesystem-oriented system. This half hour session explores the details of UNIX process manage- ment. --- Administrator's view of the filesystem The complement to processes, files are the underpinning of all UNIX system administration. This session tours the en- tire UNIX filesystem from the sysadmin's viewpoint. Monday Afternoon: Users and common peripherals --- User management Adding users, assigning logins, and user ID management comprise the meat of this discussion. --- Terminals, modems, printers After backups, maintenance of serial devices is the administrator's biggest headache. This session exposes the tricks needed to solve serial-line problems quickly. Tuesday Morning: Public Domain Tools --- Public Domain Software A wealth of public domain software is available for the ask- ing. This session describes dozens of the packages and how to obtain them for free. --- PERL: The administrator's programming language PERL is a new interpreted language ideally suited to system administration. Its syntax includes all the best parts of C, awk, sed, and shell programming. This 2.5 hour tutorial leverages your knowledge of C programming to get you up-to- speed in this vibrant new programming paradigm. Tuesday Afternoon: Running your machine --- Backups The reliability, convenience, and politics of backups are discussed in this one hour session. --- Machine room organization This section focuses on preparing machine rooms for day-to- day activities and meeting emergencies as they arise. --- System upgrades As soon as you've had to upgrade a major release of your operating system, you know there must be a better way. This session discusses alternatives to re-creating all your cus- tomized files from scratch. --- Software Patent Discussion Software patents have the potential to affect every single line of code we write. This consciousness-raising interac- tive session will present one organizations view of this possible menace. Wednesday Morning: Networks --- Overview The functionality of local and wide-area networks is the focus of this overview. --- Hardware and software required This session focuses on getting networks to work for you. --- NFS distributed filesystem, YP Administering multi-workstation shops leads to problems in distribution of user and administrative files. NFS and YP, solutions to these problems. are presented here. --- Routing --- Name service Joining a wide-area network leads to new problems in names of machines and domains. These two sections explain how the Internet keeps track of its thousands of hosts. --- SLIP The benefits of local area networking (ftp, rsh, NFS) are available on serial lines to those who know SLIP, which is explained here. Wednesday Afternoon: UUCP & Security --- UUCP The first widespread telephone network protocol is UUCP. This session details how to install and use it. --- Security General security mechanisms for UNIX and a description of the public domain COPS security monitoring system comprise this session. --- Ethics, Privacy, Security Dealing with large user communities leads to new problems in data collection, software licensing, security, and ethics. This session will discuss scenarios and techniques that can be applied by system managers systems to insure happy, healthy, ethical user communities. Thursday Morning: Sendmail & Kerberos --- Sendmail Certainly the most complex part of system administration, the sendmail configuration file syntax is explained in de- tail with examples in this session. --- Kerboros IV security Kerberos IV (from MIT) is the new state-of-the-art in UNIX authentication. This overview tells how it might affect you in coming years. Thursday Afternoon: Netnews & Management --- Network News Hundreds of megabytes of bulletin board text move around nation-wide networks on a daily basis. This session discusses how to tap into this network of information and experts discussing their work. --- Management policies --- Hiring and training personnel Putting together an effective system administration team re- quires the responsibility and authority to do your job. Hiring and training personnel to be able to perform the job is the other half. This double session discusses these is- sues. --- Performance UNIX performance tuning is done more through installation and good planning than changing kernel parameters. Monitor- ing, diagnosing, and improving performance form the kernel of this session. --- Miscellaneous comments Seven slides of goodies that fit nowhere else are the heart of this talk. For registration information, contact: The Advanced Technical Management Program UCLA Extension 10995 Le Conte Ave., Suite 540 Los Angeles, CA 90024-2883 213-825-3858 For course content information, contact: Rob Kolstad 719-528-4638 kolstad@usenix.org =============================================================================== Sun Rob Kolstad kolstad@sun.com Work: 719-528-4638 /\ Staff Engineer uunet!sun!kolstad Home: 719-593-9445 /\/ \ Rocky Mountain Technology Center Fax: 719-548-1009 / \ \ Sun Microsystems 5465 Mark Dabling Blvd.; Colo. 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