Linux Systems Administration

Author: C. Sean Burns
Date: 2022-08-12
Email: sean.burns@uky.edu
Website: cseanburns.github.io/csb/
GitHub: @cseanburns

Introduction

This short book was written for my Linux Systems Administration course. The book and course's goals are to provide the very basics about systems administration using Linux, and to teach students:

  1. how to use the command line in order to become more efficient computer users and more comfortable with using computers in general;
  2. how to use command line utilities and programs and to learn what can be accomplished using those programs;
  3. how to administer users and manage software on a Linux server;
  4. how to secure a Linux server; and
  5. the basics of cloud computing;

And finally, this book/course ends on walking students through the process of building a LAMP stack.

About This Book

Since I use this book for my Linux Systems Administration course, which I teach each fall semester, this book will be a live document. I will update the content as I teach it in order to address changes in the technology and to edit for clarity when I discover some aspect of the book causes confusion or does not provide enough information.

This book is not a comprehensive introduction to Linux nor to systems administration. It is designed for an entry level course on these topics and is focused on a select and small range of those topics that have specific pedagogical aims (see above).

The book started off as a series of transcripts and demonstrations. It still has that focus, but I've had a long-term goal to make these transcripts more cohesive. Achieving this became easier when I learned about mdBook.

The content in this book is open access and licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0. Feel free to fork it on GitHub and modify it for your own needs.

History of This Course

I created and started teaching this course in the Fall 2016 semester. I originally used Soyinka's (2016) excellent introduction to Linux administration, and we used VirtualBox and the Fedora Server distribution to practice and learn the material.

However, around 2018 or '19, I moved away from Soyinka's comprehensive book to focus the material on a more limited range of topics. I did this for two reasons. First, most of my students do not become systems administrators, although some have (to my delight). Second, my students have grown up using only graphical user interfaces on one of the two common, commercial operating systems, and consequently have very constrained and limited understandings of how computers work and what can be done with them. In redesigning this course, I wanted to strike a balance between these two problems. I wanted students to acquire enough skills and gain enough confidence to feel comfortable applying for (at least) entry level systems administrator jobs, and more basically, I wanted students to be exposed to a different type of computing environment than what they were used to and that fostered a hacking mentality, in the more benign and playful sense of the word.

I moved us away from using Fedora Server for the Fall 2022 course. Fedora Server is a great and fun operating system, and there's a lot to learn about Linux using it. However, since it is rather bleeding edge, it meant something would break in my demonstrations each semester, and identifying what had changed in Fedora each year made it somewhat of a chore to keep up. I have therefore switched to a less bleeding edge distribution of Linux: a still supported Ubuntu Server LTS release. Based on my personal experience managing servers that run on some version of Ubuntu LTS, I believe this should provide more stability. It helps that Ubuntu Server has a good share of the Linux server market.

The primary reason I moved us away from VirtualBox is because a good number of my students each year use Apple computers, which became a major obstacle when Apple switched to the M1 chip. I originally considered asking those students to use different virtualization software, but it was nice to have all students, regardless of operating system, and myself using the same software. I also considered using something like Docker as a replacement, but decided instead to use Google Cloud. I figured that learning how to use a service like Google Cloud might be more broadly useful to students, and that if we used Docker, we'd have to spend a lot of time installing and configuring that on their laptops. Time is already a constraint in this course, but we'll see how it goes this semester (Fall 2022).

References

Soyinka, W. (2016). Linux administration: A beginner's guide (7th ed.). New York: MacGraw Hill Education. ISBN: 978-0-07-184536-6