Operating systems

Lecturer

Edmund Laugasson

Intro

All subject related infotmation will be put up on Wiki page, due to the possibility to have access to the materials even after the subject has concluded. Materials, such as tests, lectures and links to additional materials, will remain available throughout the subject teaching period.

Aim of this course

The aim of this course is to introduce the basics of operating systems and IT system life cycle from the viewpoint of the IT system administrator of operating systems. This subject provides hands-on skills needed to complete other field specific subjects in the curriculum.

Lectures give a theoretical background and the labs give hands-on skills on the same topic using Ubuntu Linux Server.

This subject is oriented on hands-on practical assignments to compliment the theoretical side of the subject.

Learning outcome 1:

A student who has completed the subject is able to perform the most common administrative tasks (user management, software management, disk usage, process management) in at least one of the most popular operating system on a server.

Learning outcome 2:

A student who has completed the subject understands and is able to explain orally the basic concepts of operating systems and its security aspects.

Learning outcome 3:

The student is able to document an operating system's service from an IT systems administrator's viewpoint.

Portfolio

Please fulfill the following form.

Deadlines for assignments

03.04.2017 - Submission of wiki article's topic

02.05.2017 - lab works defended

08.05.2017 23:59 - Submission of wiki article

09.05.2017 - Pre practical test for students, who have done all of their labs

16.05.2017 - Last option to defend lab work

23.05.2017 - Practical test

All dates are inclusive.

Instant messaging

Public chat for any subject related questions can be asked at the channel #eitc-osadmin:matrix.org and client software: Riot.im.

Launch Riot here in browser.

Course materials

• Course materials can be found here.
• recordings are available here

Links

• learn the command line
• some VMs, ISOs
• 10 Free Linux Administration e-books
• Introduction to operating systems (videos)
• Operating systems (wikipedia article)
• additional OSadmin materials
• additional materials
• Debian Administrator's Handbook
• Ubuntu Server Guide
• Linux Journey
• Linux and other free software related links
• Linux news, magazines

Finding help

• https://help.ubuntu.com/ - official documentation
• https://ubuntu-manual.org/

Also some searches:

• https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=ubuntu+tutorial
• https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=ubuntu+howto
• https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=ubuntu+guide

Replace the word "ubuntu" with "linux" and there can be find yet more materials.

Also I encourage to use YouTube which is full of videotutorials.

• https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ubuntu+tutorial
• https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ubuntu+howto
• https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ubuntu+guide

Replace the word "ubuntu" with "linux" and there can be find yet more materials.

Certainly all the information might not be trustful but you can test at first in virtual machine if you have doubts. Also ask from instant messenger (also current course has one), IRC-channels. If you search https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=ubuntu+irc+channel then you will find them. You will also find IRC client howtos.

Usually if to search "problem name or error message + operating system name, version" (without quotation marks) then you will find results (e.g.: bluetooth ubuntu 16.04). Usually one of the findings will solve a problem or at least give hints what to do and possible workarounds.

Also using different search engines might give different results. In addition of Google, you can try also Startpage, DuckDuckGo etc - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Lab works

Here are some introductory lab tasks available. Labs for assessment are coming into I-Tee virtual laboratory system.

Please check also log about lab works.

Lab 0

Installing Ubuntu Server LTS

Introduction to Unix command line (cd, ls, cat, full path, relative path etc)

Lab 1

Managing users (adduser, addgroup, passwd, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow)

1) Create a user sysadmin

2) Add a new group devops and add a the user sysadmin to a previously created group.

3) Divert the user sysadmin's password hash via cowsay to a file called hash.txt.

4) Lock the user sysadmin and be ready to show me the indication of the user being locked.

5) Change the user's current home directory into /home/unknown so that the files will also be moved to the new location.

Managing files (mkdir, cp, mv, rm, touch, nano, less, chmod, chown, rwx, 644 etc)

1) Create a folder march in root user directory and for every march day a subfolder with a name day1, day2, day3 … day31. (Example: /root/march/day1 or /root/march/day2 etc)

2) Modify the march folder owner so that it will be student and the new group audio.

3) Modify the march folder's and its subfolders so that the user can do anything, group can do ls in the folder and cd into it and others can't do anything with it.

4) Create a hard link called network to a file /etc/network/interfaces

5) Copy /var/log directory into march folder so that the timestamp and user info will be preserved.

Processes and environment variables (kill, using directing input/output/error: |, <, >, >>; env, PATH, HOME etc)

1) Divert the list with the student user's groups via cowsay into a fail studgroup.txt.

2) Create a environment variable called MYHOME that has the value of the system's HOME environment variable. (Hint: you have tu use variable symbol here!)

3) Send 2 htop's to the background and be ready to present how you send a kill signal to the first htop by job number and term signal to the second htop by a process number.

4) Create an alias called bye that logs you out of the terminal. Make this alias permanent.

5) Execute a programm called espdiff and diver the standardoutput to a file called okay.txt and the standard error to a file called notokay.txt.

Managing software (installation, updating, deleting, apt and dpkg utils)

Lab 2

Managing disks by creating partitions (fdisk, mkfs, blkid, mount, umount)

Managing swap (mkswap, swapon, swapoff)

Practical test

2016

First practical test 10th of May 2016

Second pracical test 24th of May 2016

Exam

2016

Practical exam

Topics of the oral exam in Spring 2016

Wiki article

for further information please look here

Former materials

• Operating systems 2016

Students share =

[1] Bad docs