System Admin Course

Tue Apr 2 04:07:00 AEST 1991

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 at usenix.org
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