Basic Linux Administration

(Training outline)

Part 1(By Yared Deneke, System Administrator, American School)

1. Introduction

1. Historical Background

2. What is Linux?

3. Why Linux

1. Demonstrate features

2. Installing Fedora Core 4 Linux

1. Preparation and planning

1. Hardware compatibility

2. Disk partitioning

3. Multi / single boot

4. Network configuration

5. Choosing packages

2. Lab 1

3. User Interface

1. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) X.org

1. Brief explanation of X

2. Popular desktop environments available

3. Customizing the X desktop environment

4. Remote X login

2. The Command Line Interface (CLI) bash

1. The shell

2. Basic shell commands

3. Customizing the shell

4. Remote login

5. Virtual consoles

3. Lab 2

4. Starting up Linux

1. Boot sequence and runlevels

2. Configure services

3. GRUB

4. Lab 3

5. File System and User Management

1. File System basics

1. Disks, partitions and mount points

2. Creating, formatting and checking partitions

3. Types of files

4. File management tools

5. File system Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

2. Lab 4

3. User Management

1. Users and groups

1. User ID, group ID, home directory, shell account

2. Passwords

3. Tools to manage users

4. Lab 5

5. Troubleshooting and Getting Help

1. Booting up

2. Network

3. X window

Lab 6

Part 2 (By Yonas Hailu, Lecturer, HILCOE school of Computer Science)

6. Networking

1. Network configuration

1. IP Address

2. DNS

3. Gateway

2. Dial-up configuration

3. Connecting to a LAN

1. Connecting to Windows File Servers

2. Connecting to NFS shares

4. Basic Network Security

5. Tools for configuring network devices

7. Printing

1. Setup a local and network printer

2. Common Unix Printing System (CUPS)

3. Printing from the CLI

8. Package Management

1. Installing Binaries

1. RedHat Package Manager (RPM) packages

2. From tar, zip, bzip etc. archives

3. Yellow dog Updater Modified (YUM) packages

2. Installing from Source Code

1. Extract, configure, compile and install

9. Monitoring the system

1. Getting to know your hardware

2. Monitoring processes

3. Monitoring the network

4. Starting and stopping services

5. System logs

10. Advanced Topics

1. Using the vi editor

2. Scheduling jobs

3. Shell Scripting

4. Programming in Linux

1. C, Java, Perl and PHP

Labs

Lab 1: Install Fedora Core 4 from CDs

Lab 2: a. start up a remote X session and remote X login

b. Remote login using SSH

c. Exercise using basic shell commands

Lab 3: change runlevel

Modify GRUB

Configure Daemons/Services

Lab 4: Change permissions and ownership on files/directories

edit /etc/fstab

move /home partition to a new disk/partition

Lab 5: Add user/group. Add user to group. Modify user attribute. Delete user/group

Lab 6: troubleshoot boot, X windows, and network problems