Unix System Administration Essentials Course

Welcome to the Virtual Training course Unix System Administration Essentials. Hello I'm Bobby Rogers and I'm going to be your guide throughout this course. What we're going to give you is a fundamental understanding of Unix System Administration. Now, our focus during this course is going to be primarily hands-on demonstrations. We're probably going to try to avoid the fluff you see in other courses. In other words, we're not going to talk much about the history of Unix, how to install it, the background of different Unix commands and so forth. We're not really going to cover that much. What we want to focus on again is hand-on with particular tools, utilities, tasks, functions and so forth. How to do things in Unix. Essentials means basically for our purposes no highly-complex material. We're not going to cover scripting and we're not going to get into advanced security configurations, for example. This is the you got to know this stuff to be a Unix admin type of essentials course. Our target audience for this course is a new administrator or an administrator who may have some experience in other operating systems such as Windows or Linux or so forth. These administrators may need a solid background in the fundamentals of Unix administration in particular and so with that we're going to cover a wide variety of Unix commands, utilities, functions and so forth related to Unix-specific system administration. Now, most of what we're going to cover are Command Line utilities. We will be spending a lot of time at the Command Line although, where appropriate, we will cover some GUI utilities where necessary, where it makes sense to do so. Now, there's a big family of Unix-like operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Solaris, iRex and so forth but what we want to cover is the core of all of those things; Unix system administration. Because if you understand Unix system administration, then you probably can understand Linux, Solaris, iRex and so forth since they're all very similar and all, when you get down to it, really based upon Unix. So we're probably going to cover more Unix system administration than anything, although where appropriate we will cover some Linux and Solaris as well so that you can see when there are some significant differences how to do things. Since we're trying to stick primarily to Unix system administration, we're going to use the closest operating system today that's out there that's closest to pure System 5 Unix and that's the Berkeley Software Distribution or, as it's sometimes called BSD. Specifically we'll be using the free BSD distribution, although there are others you can use. You can use OpenBSD and NetBSD for example. But we're going to be using Free BSD. It's freely downloadable from the Internet. It's easy to install and it gives you a really good, solid background on pure Unix system administration. One good thing about Unix and Linux and Solaris and the other Nix family of operating systems means that there is more than one way to perform tasks to likely we're going to cover ways of doing things that you've done before if you've administered another Linux or Solaris system. However, we may cover things that you may not have seen before and that's OK. That's one of the beautiful things about Unix and Linux in general is that there are more one way to do things. So you'll learn some new ways about how to do things you may have been doing in the past and you'll serve to reinforce knowledge that you already have as well. So having said that, sit back and enjoy the course. Next we're going to cover a brief overview of the different topics we're going to talk about during this course.