Objectives of the course.

Provide Computer Science and IFSM students an understanding of the issues and knowledge needed in performing the function of System Administration. While Unix system administration will be emphasized most of the concepts are transferable to other areas such as VMS or Novell.

In this particular course we will emphasize practical issues related to the day-to-day administration of systems. Specifically we will not cover the initial installation of an operation system as this task is heavily vendor specific. Instead we will emphasize such issues as:

file organization and mantenance;
backup and recovery of file systems;
account generation and maintenance;
network design and administration;
device control and management;
security and system monitoring.

In addition, many issues in system administration are not technical, instead they are policy related. During this course we will point out those issues and discuss possible solutions.

Why offer a course such as this?

Traditional CMSC and IFSM courses have not addressed these mundane but necessary topics. In addition, increasingly we are seeing employers request these skills from students. In addition, as employers seeking people with these skills it is in our own interest to help produce people with these skills.

Systems Administration -- What is it? Should you be one?

Systems Administration has no concrete definition. Unlike programming, system administration positions have a huge variation in the functions they perform. Large organizations tend to make administrators specialists in specific areas (i.e. networking, security, file systems) while smaller organizations tend to have administrators become generalists in a wide range of areas (Pc's, Mac's, Unix ). There are advantages and disadvantages to each choice.

The reason I like systems administration is that each day brings a different set of challenges (often too many at the same time) and I am not tied to one task for long periods at a time.

To become a good systems administrator it takes the following set of skills:

a willingness to take on problems and the ability to methodically attack the problem until an answer is found; [ example -- my PC won't mount a file system when it boots , OR when I print this file nothing comes out , OR at random times my host cannot connect to host A but I can always connect to host B ]
a willingness to read the manuals and keep up to date technically.
People oriented. Systems administrators are rarely hired by themselves to administer there own machine. Thus, you must always keep in mind that some group is asking you to administor a machine on behalf of a group of users. A good system administrator must understand that she/he is hired to meet the needs of the users, not vice-versa.
Organized. System administrators often must keep track of a large amount of information such as users, maintenance providors, software vendors, and work requested.

Changing role of System Administration.

Client/Server computing is greatly changing the role of system administration. Previously, it was sufficient for a system administrator to be proficient in the operation and maintenance of the system they were responsible for. In today's environment an administrator must support users where there is no clear line between client software running on a PC and server software running on a Unix host. System administrators must now become familiar with all aspects of client/server computing to adequately serve their users. If anything this trend is expected to accelerate.

That is one reason why IFSM has created the system administration certificate and is teaching courses not just on Unix but on Novell administration and basic networking.

Past, Present, and Future role of Unix.

Unix was developed in the late seventies at the AT&T Bell Labs facility. Unix was developed to be a portable OS that could support time-sharing services. To achieve portability, a high level language named "C" was developed in which to write the OS. In addition, Unix was not strongly tailored to any particular hardware vendor. This allowed Unix to be ported to a large number of hardware architectures. Unix now runs on machines ranging from PC's to Super-Computers.

During the late eighties it looked like Unix would become the dominant OS of the 90's. That does not seem to be the case now. Now the belief is that some form of Microsoft Windows will rule the desktop in the 90's.

Unix does seem poised to replace the central mainframe as the departmental server/network hub. Many sites are migrating to Unix for database servers and application support, thus while not dominating the desktop Unix will probably continue as a viable OS through the 90's.