The course Web page is http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~brian/course/sysadmin/. Lecture notes, assignments, and announcements will be available there.
System Administration will be taught by Prof. Brian D. Davison. My email is davison (at) cse.lehigh.edu. My homepage is http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~brian/. My office is in Packard 251A (inside my PL251 lab), and my office hours are 3-4pm Mondays and 11-noon Wednesdays. All other meetings should be by appointment. My office phone is 610-758-3453 (but I much prefer email).
This course has two required texts: Linux Administration Handbook, by Nemeth, Snyder, and Hein; Prentice Hall (2002). The Practice of System and Network Administration, by Limoncelli and Hogan; Addison Wesley (2002). Both are (or will be) available from the university and online bookstores.PrerequisitesIn addition, you may find additional references (especially on using UNIX/Linux, scripting, etc.) to be helpful; online versions of books on Apache, Perl, DNS and BIND, Linux, MySQL, NFS and NIS, SSH, TCP/IP Network Administration, Samba, UNIX, and more are available through the Lehigh library's electronic books (via Safari). Other useful online books include The Linux System Administrator's Guide, Linux Administration Made Easy, and others from The Linux Documentation Project.
CSE 109 Systems Programming (or graduate standing) is the only prerequisite. However, familiarity with UNIX or Linux (as a user) will also be assumed. Those who have taken courses such as networking (CSE 342 or 404), operating systems (CSE 303), and programming in C and UNIX (CSE 271) may have some advantage.Grading
Expected grading: homeworks, quizzes, and class participation will be worth 15%; projects 20%; hourly exam 1 - 20%; hourly exam 2 - 20%; and final exam 25%. Late assignments will lose 10% per day.Topics to be covered
What does a sysadmin do? Desktops, servers, services; booting; being root; processes; filesystems; user management; backups; disaster recovery; logging; networking; DNS; NFS; email; security; web hosting; software installation, maintenance, and upgrades; printing; performance analysis; helpdesk and customer care; policies; ethics.Focus
The general concepts covered in this course apply to the administration of all kinds of systems. However, in order to ground the ideas presented, we will focus primarily on one -- Linux, a popular UNIX-like OS for which we can provide facilities and is easily available to anyone with a PC.Facilities
In addition to in-class lectures and textbook readings, this course will include assignments and exercises to be performed as the system administrator (e.g., with complete control) of a RedHat Linux installation. The Sandbox lab (PL112) provides a facility in which you can be root, make changes to the OS, and safely make mistakes. We will provide each student with a hard drive, pre-installed with a base installation of the RedHat Linux OS. These drives enable the use of the PCs in the Sandbox lab.Policy on Disabilities
If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting accommodations, please contact your professor and the Office of Academic Services, Room 212, University Center or call (610-758-4152) as early as possible in the semester. University policy states that you must notify your professor seven (7) days prior to the exam.