CSE 265: System and Network Administration

Lab #1

Normally lab exercises will be found online (linked from the course schedule), and not printed and given to you. This lab is http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~brian/course/2008/sysadmin/labs/lab1.html.

1. Today you will sign out a removable hard drive for use in the Sandbox Lab (PL112) for the semester. These HP workstations are fairly new, with a Core2 Duo CPU, dual NICs, 2GB RAM, workstation-class Nvidia graphics card, DVD writer, and widescreen monitor. The drives you are getting are regular 80GB SATA hard drives inside a removable case -- in other words, easily broken -- so be careful with yours. You are responsible for it. You'll need to have your drive whenever you want to work in this lab (e.g., lab sessions, projects, etc.). As given to you, the drive contains a pretty complete XP installation that you might also find helpful this semester (on 40G) and leaves the remaining portion of the drive unused, which we will use today. You'll also want to bring your copies of LAH and CR as the lab exercises will refer to them.

2. Once you have your drive, you need to install CentOS 5.1 onto it. We will be installing using media accessed over the network. There are two on-campus CentOS repositories that I know of: http://ftp.cse.lehigh.edu/pub/centos/5.1/os/i386/ and http://blaze.cc.lehigh.edu/linux/centos/5.1/os/i386/. Use the first one (when prompted later) as it is on our local network unless it is unusable for some reason. You'll still need a network install CD to get started (I have burned 6 of them for this lab).

   To get started, carefully put your drive into your machine, and lock it in place with the lab key. Turn on your machine and put the CD into the system.

   Once the CD has booted, press Enter to start the OS installation (described in CR, chapter 2). There are a number of places where the system asks you for a decision. In most cases you will choose the default (or select the obvious choice). Please make the same choices I did, so that we will all have systems configured in the same way.

   • After it boots, you'll need to press Enter to start a graphical installation.
   • Since English has already been chosen, press Next.
   • Since US English has already been chosen, press Next.
   • When asked what kind of network access method, choose HTTP.
   • These machines have two network cards installed; when asked which card, use the onboard Broadcom Gigabit ethernet (should be connected directly to the Lehigh LAN with a grey ethernet cable), and is likely listed as eth1.
   • When asked about TCP/IP versions, use the defaults (both IPv4 and IPv6).
   • I believe this is when you'll need to specify the source of the network installation media, specifying the hostname (ftp.cse.lehigh.edu) and the path (/pub/centos/5.1/os/i386/).
   • When asked about partitioning, the default is fine -- to remove all Linux partitions. A warning will show up, and again you can select Yes.
   • It should then show a default network configuration, which should be fine -- eth1 should be on automatic, active on boot, using DHCP.
   • The timezone will likely already be correct.
   • Set root password -- I recommend "lehigh" without the quotes.
   • It will now ask what major groups of packages should it install. Please select these three:
     • Desktop-Gnome (selected by default)
     • Server
     • Server-GUI
     We can customize and add more packages later as we need them.
   • Network installation (including formatting, downloading and installing) took about 8 minutes (when there was no competition for the network server).
   • When asked about security, enable firewall (default), with ssh access permitted.
   • Disable SELinux -- we will not be using that aspect of Linux security. And yes, it will need to reboot as a result when settings are complete.
   • Disable Kdump.
   • Instead of setting the time, choose the Network Time Protocol tab, choose enable, and click Next.
   • Choose a non-root username. I recommend using your standard university account name.
   • Feel free to test the sound (a decent internal speaker).
   • No additional CDs.
   • And then a final reboot. It will automatically boot into CentOS. You are now finished with the install CD; you can hand it to someone else who needs one or back to the instructor.

3. You should now log in as the non-root user. If you are not familiar with Red Hat/Fedora, explore the system. CR 3 and 6 introduces you to many of the features of the desktop. In particular, make sure you know where to find the Terminal (which opens a window with a shell). You'll often need it in the future, as much of what we do will be at the command line.

   For what I consider to be an interesting feature, take a look at the Connect to Server menu under Places. Choose ssh as the service type, set server=sunlab.cse.lehigh.edu, folder=/home/bdd3/ and user name=bdd3 (put your username instead of bdd3 in both places), and give it a name to use for this connection. Click Connect. You'll get a warning message, but that's OK. It will have created an icon on your desktop, and a new entry in the Places menu. Choose one, and say Log In Anyway when prompted the first time. This provides you with browser access to your files on the other system. In many cases, you can just double-click and the system will open your file with the default application here (although it may ask for your password one or more times). Another variation is to use service type Secure WebDAV, connect to server webdav.cc.lehigh.edu, setting folder and your username to your Lehigh username.

4. In the top-right there is/was a notification telling you that there are a number of updates available for you. While CentOS 5.1 was released just last month, there are already updates that you should install. Go ahead and view the updates (which runs the graphical package updater application requiring root access), and then give it permission to update all of the listed packages.

5. Find the Firefox web browser, and check what the reading assignment is for our next lecture, and to see what is in homework #1. If you are relatively new to Linux, you should start browsing some sections of Introduction to Linux (at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/). If you are not yet an expert at using bash, try the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/).

   Become familiar with your system. In the shell, use df to see what drive partitions are installed and their size (we'll be working with partitions in a future lab). Run top to see how much memory is available and what processes are running. Run 'uname -a' to see what version of the OS is running.

   From a shell, use ssh to log into a sun. Use df to see what drive partitions are mounted on the sun you are using. Use '/usr/ucb/whereis df' to find another version of df that presents results in a very different format. Which one generates output that looks like what you see under Linux?

   Finally, introduce yourself to your neighbors. It's good to be friendly, and in some future labs, you'll need to work with a partner.

6. This concludes the first lab. Feel free to explore your system further -- it has lots of interesting and useful packages installed on it (such as MS Office-compatible applications, simple games, a dictionary, and much more that can be installed).