Lab Homepage

CSCI 257: Fundamental UNIX System Administration


TA: Todd Lisonbee
email: toddj@ecst.csuchico.edu

Dr. Luk's Homepage http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~luk/


Class Project for Spring 2003

The goal of the class project is to provide students with practical experience to administer Linux installation and administration on a computer shared with Windows.


 CSCI 257 Lab Assignments
Week
 Date
 Labs Assigned
 Assignments Due
1
 1/29
 Lab1, Lab2
2
 2/5
Lab1 turn-in Lab1 Questions
3
 2/12

4
 2/19
 Lab3
 Lab2
5
 2/26
 Lab4
 Lab3
6
 3/5

7
 3/12
 Lab5
 Lab4,


Spring Break
8
 3/26
 Lab6
 Lab5
9
 4/2

10
 4/9
 Lab7 (this is big, start early)
 Lab6
11
 4/16

12
 4/23
 Lab8
 Lab7
13
 4/30

14
 5/7
Lab8  (everything is due, including extra credit!)
15
 5/14
 (dead week)


Finals Week

Note: This calendar is tenative and may experience some small changes as the semester progresses.

Grading

Lab assignments make up 50% of the grade for this course.  Assignments are weighted according to difficulty and the amount of time they should take.  Dr. Luk's late policy is no late assignments (so can to talk to him if you want to turn in something late).  Here is an outline of the lab assignments:
Lab 1 - Introduction - 5%
Lab 2 - Linux Installation- 15%
Lab 3 - User accounts, Processes, File System - 10%
            (useradd, userdel, usermod, df, du, ps, top, pstree, time, su, man, whatis, kill, /etc, /proc)
Lab 4 - Permissions, Searching, Shell Features and Customization, Basic Scripting - 10%
            (find, grep, locate, which, whereis, type, chown, chmod, tee, bash config files)
Lab 5 - Scheduling (sleep, at, cron), Write clnet script - 10%
Lab 6 - User and group management, write text2dos script and logrotate script - 15%
Lab 7 - Write the usertool script (a large script that could actually be useful) - 20%
Lab 8 - Some Networking Utilities (ftp, whois, ping, traceroute, etc), Archiving (tar, gzip, bzip2, md5sum) - 15%

Extra Credit - Building a Kernel, Modules (lsmod, modprobe, modinfo, rmmod) [ask for details] - 5%
Extra Credit - Write a manpage for some imaginary command (this should use formatting commands like .TH and .SH like in real man pages) - 5% (easy)
Extra Credit - Learn about either BIND or sendmail and write a 5-10 page paper on what they are for and how to configure them. - 5%

Full extra credit points will only be given if you do a nice job on these things.  Talk with me before hand to make sure you know what to do.
If you miss the whole point you won't get any points (example: writing a man page in MS Word instead of imbedding formatting information like in 'real' man pages)

Note: Some things might be added to some of these assignments that aren't in these general descriptions.

Some Resources

Recommended Reading

For fun

Link to Video shown in class

Stallman Lecture in Lund, Sweden 2000-02-11
http://www.df.lth.se/~triad/stallman.html