73065 - Laboratory Of System Administration T

Learning outcomes

Students will acquire the ability to deal with the problems related to the management of networked multiuser/multitasking systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the security aspects and on the integration of heterogeneous operating systems. Main outcomes include the ability to diagnose network faults, to monitor resource usage, to plan, implement and configure small/medium-sized networks. Abilities will include both theoretical competences and practical knowkedge about the most common tools used to perform and to automate the aforementioned tasks.

Course contents

The goal of this course is to present the main subjects related to system administration, and to provide some fundamental skills needed to configure and monitor GNU/Linux systems in particular.

Entry requirements: IN ORDER TO EFFECTIVELY FOLLOW THE COURSE, A GOOD GRASP OF COMPUTER NETWORKS AND OPERATING SYSTEMS IS ESSENTIAL.

The common thread of the lectures is an attention to safety/security, i.e. the ability to make systems resilient to faults, errors, and malicious attacks as well, starting from considerations that apply to isolated systems and proceeding to discuss the existence of systems within a network.

The typical week for this course is composed of a 3-hour lecture and a 4-hour lab session. When feasible, the lab activities closely follow the corresponding theoretical lesson. The web page for the last completed academic year, reachable from the LIA web page, shows the completed activities day by day. The next edition may follow a slightly different calendar, but no significant changes will happen.

The program is composed of six main areas:
 - Local administration: hardware set-up and physical security, user account management, authorization mechanisms on the Unix and NTFS filesystems, overview of the typical origin of vulnerabilities, command line tools to configure processes and to monitor resource usage, standard daemons used for the automation of the administration tasks (e.g. scheduled execution, logging, ...);
- Information security: a short introduction to the key concepts in classical and modern cryptography, with examples of day-to-day use;
- Network management: interface and routing configuration, connection monitoring tools, packet sniffing tools, firewall architectures for the filtering of traffic;
- Centralized monitoring: a short introduction to the platforms used in large and/or heterogeneous installations, the SNMP protocol;   
- Centralized configuration: protocols used for automatic network configuration (RARP, BOOTP, DHCP), centralized authentication and distribution of configuration parameters at the application level by means of LDAP, a short overview of Active Directory;
- High availability distributed systems: basic concepts about availability, tools for reliable data storage (RAID, backup techniques), cluster architectures for the highly available provisioning of network services.

Bash shell programming is introduced and discussed in some depth during the whole course: it is the foundation for practical activities regarding the theoretical subjects.

Readings/Bibliography

Handouts by the teacher, on-line manuals on the lab workstations, and material available on the course website, linked from http://lia.disi.unibo.it/Courses/ under the current academic year. 

On the same website, many old exams are available; for some, solutions are provided.

Guidebooks published for free by Truelite: https://labs.truelite.it/projects/truedoc/wiki

The closest match to the course's contents:

"Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook - 5th edition" di Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, Ben Whaley, Dan Mackin; ed. Addison Wesley Professional (2017) - ISBN-13: 978-0134277554

For anyone wishing to acquire some knowledge about Microsoft Windows:

 "Microsoft Windows Server Administration Essentials" di Tom Carpenter”, ed. Sybex (2011)

Teaching methods

The course yields 9 CFU/ECTS corresponding to 90 hours of lectures and guided lab activities, typically in sessions lasting 3 to 4 hours each.  The theoretical bases of the techniques of system administration are presented during approximately 35 hours of traditional lectures. The remaining 55 hours are spent in the laboratory. During each session, the command line tools in the GNU/Linux environment, useful to deal with the subjects treated in the lectures, are introduced. Then, students are guided to design and implement scripts to solve proposed study cases, to improve their problem-solving skills in real-world scenarios.

Please note that according to the ECTS definition, each credit represents 25 hours of student effort: students are expected to contribute 135 hours of individual study and autonomous lab activity to the improvement of their skills. To this end, extensions to the guided lab activities are regularly suggested. Solutions are publicly discussed during the last lab sessions of the course; besides, students are welcome to discuss the assignments during office hours.

Attendance is recommended, especially to lab sessions. Slides are a guidance, but lectures explain what to focus the study on. Guided lab activities are the best way to understand the real level of difficulty of different exercises.

Assessment methods

• The exam is split in two steps: a lab exercise, followed by an oral examination. Passing the lab exercise is required to be admitted to the oral examination. The result is pass/fail.
• Three hours are allotted to the lab exercise, which is designed around the subjects proposed during the lab sessions of the course. During the test, candidates are allowed to use teaching materials, notes, and software components prepared by themselves.
• The oral examination typically focuses on the subjects presented during classroom lectures. If the candidate got a convincing grade at the lab exercise, the oral exam will be composed of two questions, and it will typically be over in 20 minutes. Students hovering just above the passing grade will be admitted but explicitly notified that their oral exam will be longer, usually including a section to prove they understood the mistakes made in the lab exercise.
• The oral examination may be replaced by written questions of the same kind, followed by a short discussion of the answers.
• Date and time of exams are published on AlmaEsami. Subscription is mandatory.
• For oral exams, it is possible to ask for a personal appointment, in person or by email (after passing the lab exercise)
• Students are kindly asked to act in a civil manner, avoiding to fill the lists up if they are unlikely to show up, and especially not subscribing to more than one list.
• FAILED LAB EXAMS: students failing the lab exercise MUST meet with the instructor to discuss their work before being allowed to try again.
• EXPIRATION OF LAB GRADES: according to the Study Course regulations, students who got a passing grade in the lab exercise must take the oral exam and register the outcome by Oct. 30 (for lab exams taken between March and October) or the start of the new edition (for lab exams taken between November and February). After those dates, the result of the lab exam will no longer be valid. 

Teaching tools

Lessons: projection of slideshows and practical demonstrations of the tools object of the discussion. Practical laboratory activity: the teacher will guide the students to learn tools and solve problems regarding almost every subject of the course. A virtualized environment is available, allowing to simulate realistic architectures made of clients, servers, and routing devices, where students can work with administrative privileges. Students can deploy the same virtual machines on their computers, thus being able to access at home the same work environment they find in the laboratory.

Links to further information

http://lia.disi.unibo.it/Courses/

Office hours

See the website of Marco Prandini