System Administration LTAT.06.003
This course aims to give the students a practical approach to IT systems by putting them into the role of a system administrator. During this course the student will try to shoulder different tasks a normal system administrator has to face daily, while learning about systems, integrations, monitoring and DevOps.
Prerequisites
You are expected to know the basics of Linux, networking and the internet, and to be able to use any preferred search engine.
This is not an "Introduction to Linux" course!
Course info
This course is taught in two parts - weekly lectures and practical sessions (labs).
Lectures are there to establish basic knowledge of topics, give explanations and examples, and create an overall understanding of the topic.
Practical sessions are built to be highly hands-on but independent - students are given guides with thorough explanations how to do the lab, which is then supervised by teachers in person during the physical classroom lessons, through Zoom during virtual lessons, or through Slack at other times.
Learning outcomes:
After finishing the course, student is..
- .. capable of interacting with a UNIX like environment.
- .. able to find, debug and fix simpler IT systems related virtualized hardware, networking, information security and typical IT services related issues.
- .. capable of finding information about problems by themselves.
- .. familiar with currently popular layer 7 protocols and has the ability to host them utilizing open source software.
- .. proficient enough with the overall architecture of server systems to be able to make basic architecture decisions.
Related keywords: storage, computing power, bandwidth, software, resource virtualization, cloud, orchestration, automation, filesystems, cloud, linux, devops, networking, monitoring, kubernetes, docker, ansible, apache, s3, postfix, HTTP, TLS, nagios, bash, scripting, encryption, ssh, dns, openssl, ext4
Taught by: Mait Tenslind, Vladislav Tuzov, Sander Kuusemets, Ott Eric Oopkaup, Anders Martoja
Lecture times:
- Tuesday: 10:15 - 12:00: Sander Kuusemets
(log into courses to see the Zoom link)
Lecture recordings can be found on panopto
Physical labs take place in room 2005.
Lab times:
- Group 1 (Monday groups start from second week)
- Monday: 10:15 - 12:00: Vladislav Tuzov, Sander Kuusemets
- Group 2 (Monday groups start from second week)
- Monday: 14:15 - 16:00: Ott Eric Oopkaup, Vladislav Tuzov
- Group 3 (Virtual Zoom lab ONLY) (Monday groups start from second week)
- Monday: 16:15 - 18:00: Mait Tenslind
- Group 4
- Wednesday: 8:15 - 10:00: Sander Kuusemets, Anders Martoja
- Group 5
- Wednesday: 14:15 - 16:00: Anders Martoja, Ott Eric Oopkaup
- Group 6 (Virtual Zoom lab ONLY)
- Wednesday: 16:15 - 18:00: Mait Tenslind
- Group 7
- Friday: 8:15 - 10:00: Vladislav Tuzov, Sander Kuusemets
Lab zoom links
(log into courses to see the Zoom link)
Communication
The course instructors themselves support two means of communication to ease communication between students, or with instructors - either in class, or using the course Slack.
Discussion is welcome and recommended between students, either during labs or Slack. No helping each other during the exam though.
Critical messages will be announced personally using SIS (Study information System messages) and Slack.
Assessment
- Lab excercises: 50% of the final grade comes from completing mandatory labs
- Exam: 50% of the final grade
- Course is graded positively if you collect at least 51% of total points
Labs have to be done 100% to be eligible for the final exam.
Completion of labs will be checked by an automatic system.
Exam consists of the same tasks and services that you work with in the labs, but instead of having to setup everything from ground up like in labs, you are given an exam machine that has some faults introduced to the system.
You are expected to find, debug and fix those faults with the help of the monitoring system, lab materials, your own completed lab machine, any automation you wrote and your own skills.
Lab environment
- Labs are accessed over the network, required software:
- A VPN Client
- An SSH Client
- A Web browser
Each student will be given access to a cloud virtualization project on the third week, where s/he will set up a personal VM and complete rest of their labs there. Preliminary Linux skills are highly recommended.