Introduction
Who I am
About the class
System Administration is....
Essential Tasks
History of Unix
Unix Camps
Learning your way around Unix, or Man pages are your friends
- Geoff Allen
- Not Dr. Allen!
- Real live system administrator at IT
- 11 years experience doing this stuff
- Check out the syllabus
- What this class isn't:
- "Unix for dummies"
- Dummy-level knowledge of Unix is assumed. If you don't know user-level Unix that well, you can learn it in parallel with the class, but understand that you'll have to work a little harder.
- SCS teaches a pair of Unix classes. I will assume you know the material in those classes.
- "The guru's guide to Unix internals"
- "Everything you always wanted to know about System Administration, but were afraid to ask"
- We only have a semester, after all
- "How to manage your Linux/HP-UX/Tru64/AiX/Solaris/BSD/IRIX box in 10 easy steps"
- We'll stay pretty generic, without getting into too many specifics about a particular flavor of Unix.
- What this class is:
- An overview of several important topics related to system administration
- The beginning of what you need to know to manage a Unix or Unix-like system
- A good introduction to how Unix works (at the "big picture" level)
- The top 10 ways to fail the class
10. Skip half the labs.
9. Skip half the quizzes.
8. Do all the labs, but don't turn them in.
7. Do all the labs, turn them in, but never check that they were received or graded.
6. Decide that the instructor is the "weakest link."
5. Have someone else do the labs for you. Get a good score. Bomb the quizzes and final. Get a bad score.
4. Commit computer tresspass, or some other computer crime, whether or not you learned how from this class Story: Scott
3. Attempt to bribe the instructor for something less than $50 million
2. Quit coming to class and doing any work half way through the semester, but don't withdraw from the class
1. Fail to laugh at the instructor's amusing stories, jokes, etc.
- a high-demand profession
- Even with the "dot com bust," though it's not quite as in demand as it was in, say early 2000.
- something that must be done to any system, whether it's Unix, OS/390, NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Mac or who knows what
- Easier on some systems, harder on others
- Generally harder on "easy" systems and easier on "hard" systems like Unix, Linux, or even OS/390.
- We're focusing on Unix, but similar tasks must be handled on most other systems, especially multi-user, multi-tasking systems
- often wild, surprising and "seat of the pants"
- It's still more art than science
- If you like order and discipline, try something else, like being an actuary
- frequently indistinguishable from magic
- often like solving 1 equation with 5 variables
- they told you in algebra that it wouldn't work
- often requires experimentation, hunches, and just plain weirdness to get things done Story: floor plunger; Joke: Lewiston Hill
- even if you do solve the problem, there's no guarantee you'll know what solved the problem
- Add/remove users
- Add/remove hardware
- Add/remove software
- Backups
- Monitor/troubleshoot
- Make sure everything stays up
- Help users
1969:
Developed at AT&T
00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970 is "time zero" in Unix
An experiment on an old, unused computer (a DEC PDP-7)
1970:
Ported to a PDP-11/20
C programming language invented by Dennis Ritchie to make it easier
1973:
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie re-wrote kernel in C
1974:
Source is being distributed to Universities
Since AT&T had trade restrictions due to their telephone monopoly, they couldn't really make money off of Unix
Unix begins gaining a stronghold in Universities (which would eventually lead to Unix's commercial success)
1976:
1977:
First version of BSD Unix
Based on AT&T Version 6
Developed by the Computer Systems Research Group at UC Berkeley
1979:
Version 7
Focused on being portable to various architectures
AT&T begins charging for Unix source license
$100 for universities, $21,000 for everyone else
Described in The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
Covers shell, sed, awk, and C
3BSD adds virtual memory
1983:
1984:
1985:
1987:
System V, Release 3 (Usually written Vr3 or V.3)
1990:
System V, Release 4
Sun and AT&T. Attempted to combine the best of System V and BSD
Open Software Foundation (OSF) formed
DEC, HP, IBM, and some others
1991:
OSF/1
The OSF's attempt to combine the best of System V and BSD
DEC (now Compaq) is the only vendor who has actually used the OSF/1 system, though HP and IBM both use elements from OSF/1.
First Linux kernel
1992:
1993:
????:
Unix sold to X/Open Consortium
1994:
1994:
- AT&Tish
- IRIX (SGI)
- HP/UX
- Solaris
- SCO
- RedHat Linux (sort of)
- BSDish
- ULTRIX
- OpenBSD
- NetBSD
- SunOS
- NeXTStep
- OSF/1
- Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix, formerly OSF/1)
- The Unwanted Stepchild
- AiX (IBM)
- (It's basically System V with IBM's own "interesting" additions)
- Term "man page" refers to the days when the Unix manual was printed, and each command or system call got its own page (or often pages), thus it was a "man page."
- The same reference was provided in electronic form, and the same name stuck
- Standard format
- More reference than tutorial
- Iterate!
- Read the man page
- Try the command
- Read the man page again, understand a little more
- Try the command again
- etc.
- Use man -k to look for commands
- Use the "See also" section to find other related commands; sort of a primitive hypertext system
Part of the CptS 302 Website
Instructor:
Geoff Allen
,
geoff@wsu.edu
Source Modified: Tue Aug 28 20:54:43 2001
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