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!
This is also why a networking and operating systems course is a recommended prerequisite. While not having completed those courses is mandatory for this course, this course is built with the knowledge of those courses in mind. Trying to complete this course without the knowledge from those courses might take more time than initially planned for a 6 ECT 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 - virtualized hardware, networking, information security and typical IT service related issues.
- .. capable of finding information about problems by themselves.
- .. familiar with currently popular layer 7 and internet 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 base level 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, Pille Pärnalaas, Karl Villers
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: TBD
- Group 2 (Monday groups start from second week)
- Monday 14.15: TBD
- Group 3 (Virtual Zoom lab ONLY) (Monday groups start from second week)
- Monday 16.15: Mait Tenslind, Vladislav Tuzov
- Group 4
- Wednesday 8.15: TBD
- Group 5
- Wednesday 14.15: TBD
- Group 6 (Virtual Zoom lab ONLY)
- Wednesday 16.15: Mait Tenslind, Vladislav Tuzov
- Group 7
- Friday 8.15: TBD
- Group 8 (Virtual Zoom lab ONLY)
- Friday 16.15: Mait Tenslind, Vladislav Tuzov
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, and confirmed manually.
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 faults introduced to the system.
You are expected to find, debug and fix those faults with the help of the monitoring system, lab materials, the internet, 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 second week, where they will set up a personal VM and complete rest of their labs there. Preliminary Linux skills are highly recommended.