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News and Updates:Sat Jan 28 - Everyone please sign up for the mailing list! You can find instructions on the course information page.Mon Jan 16 - Not all pages are up yet, but they will be over the next few days. Any questions, please mail them to Chris. Overview:Unix systems appear in many different places, such as machines that maintain your student information to sytems that serve up web pages for your online banking. The reasons are both historic and practical: some software was originally developed only under unix and requires support in that OS and some tasks are simply more easily managed on a unix system.No matter what type of software you may design and implement, chances are some of that software you be on a unix-based system, or deployed on one. Understanding unix systems will prepare you for entry into a larger world within computing, as well as understanding of some of the different issues faced by people every day. After taking this course, a student should have:
The goal of the course is to familiarize you with standard tools and programs under Unix to solve everyday common problems of security, availability, and scalability. I want you to walk out of this course confident to maneuver inside a unix system. The course is structured mainly around Linux as this variant of Unix is very commonly used and widespread. Other variants such as BSD and Solaris will be covered but to a lesser extent, mainly to discuss differences, both positive and negative. No one part of Unix is complex, but the sheer volume of information is generally what is overwhelming. Many different utilities and daemons interact and end up being co-dependent, allowing for a lot of things to go wrong in many different ways when managed poorly, or even simply changed without knowing the full effect of the changes! Only time and experience lend to seeing all of the interactions of the processes within a Unix system. Some programming is required for the course, and familiarity does help, as many programming courses introduce you to a unix environment. A unix system can be managed without a single line of code written, but many tasks to make your life easier as a Unix systems administrator are made trivial with the use of scripting. You will be introduced to scripting in Bash and Perl. |