Syllabus

Official:

CptS 150.

Practical:

Familiarity with the Unix operating system and experience with at least one structured programming language (C preferred). Also helpful to know vi.

30% Quizzes, one per topic (pretty much one per chapter, and close to one per week)
40% Laboratory projects (may include one or more "take home labs" -- a code word for "homework")
30% Comprehensive final exam

Note: Grading for this class is not curved. Everyone can get an "A"; Everyone can get an "F". It's up to you.

Generally, the scale will be within a couple of points of the following. The exact placement will be that which gives the most most logical split between A- and B+.

A: 93	B+: 87	C+: 77	D+: 64
A-: 90	B: 83	C: 73	D: 58
	B-: 80	C-: 70	F: 57 and lower

Topics:

1. Introduction: Unix history, essential tasks of system administration.
2. Booting and Shutting down: Bootstrapping, single- and multi-user operation, startup scripts and processes, startup problem diagnosis, reinitialization, shutting down.
3. Rootly powers: Privileged operations, file and process ownership, system accounts and superuser access.
4. File system: organization, file types, permissions, and directory tree organization.
5. Processes: Identifiers, components, life cycle, signaling, and process monitoring.
6. Users: adding and deleting users, user account initialization scripts, quotas, authorization, pseudo-logins.
7. Periodic processes: cron and at -- system-scheduled maintenance process configuration.
8. Log files: deciphering and managing.
9. Networking: Network hardware, TCP/IP operations, routing.
10. The Domain Name System: configuration and use
11. Electronic mail: user agents, transport agents, delivery agents, configuring and using sendmail
12. Security: password security, hacking, cracking, privileged execution, security tools.
13. Policy and politics. Computer ethics, "real world" problems, politics, penalties for misuse of systems.