ITI-481 UNIX Administration

Final Project (v3.1)

 

Christopher Uriarte

Rutgers University Center for Applied Computing Technology

 

1.  Installation

  1. Describe some important things that you should know about your computer before installing a UNIX operating system?
  2. How might your installation differ between a computer system that will be used as a single-person workstation (like we used in class) and a 50-100 user server that users use for daily development work?
  3. Describe some important things related to networking that you should know before installing a UNIX operating system.

 

 

2.  Logins, Users and System Files

  1. Describe what happens during a typical UNIX login?  After a user enters his username and password, what do you think the system does to authenticate the user and grant him access to the system?  What system files are examined?  What particular fields in those system files are crucial to the login process?
  2. Describe what the following command does on a Linux or Solaris system: useradd -g iti481 -d /home/john -s /bin/tcsh -m chris
  3. The user “john” on your UNIX system has just quit his job.  Your boss has asked you remove John’s login from the system and give all the files under his home directory to Judy.  What do you have to do to accomplish this?  Include any command you may use.

 

 

3.  Grouping and Permissions

Assume that we have a group of three users that are working on a project.  Each user needs full read and write access to a set of files under the directory /var/docs/project1.

  1. Describe how you would go about creating a user/group permission scheme that will allow each of these users to access these files and create new files in the /var/docs/project1 directory.  Include details about the commands you would use and the files you would edit.
  2. Assuming you setup the user/group permission scheme correctly in question 3a, a user in that group should now be able to create files in the directory /var/docs/project1.  What must that user do to ensure that the other members of the group (and only the other members of the group) can read and write that file he just created?

 

4.  Software Installation

Opera is a web browser that works just like Netscape and Internet Explorer (http://www.opera.com).  If you download Opera for your Linux system, you may have the choice to download the software in any of three file types – those files are and their descriptions are:

 

Opera-5.1.6-linux.i586.rpm          -Opera 5.1.6 in RPM format

Opera-5.1.6-linux.tar.gz            -Opera 5.1.6 tar/gzip binary

Opera-5.1.6-src.tar.gz              -Opera 5.1.6 source code

 

  1. Assuming that you are on a Linux system, which file would you choose to download and why?
  2. If you want to install Opera on a HP-UNIX and the files above were your only three choices, which file would you choose and why?
  3. List some of the commands you would use to install the Opera software package.

 

 

 

5.  Disks and Partitions

There’s a big problem with one of the heavily used UNIX servers at the office.  A “df –k” command shows the following:

 

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             972M  670M  251M  73% /
/dev/hda4             2.6G  1.7G  774M  69% /usr
/dev/hda5             19G   18.2M 800M  98% /home
/dev/hdb1             40G   2M     38G   5% /opt

 

(Note:  In the printout above “M” stands for megabytes and “G” stands for gigabytes.  1 gigabyte is equal to approximately 1000 megabytes.)

 

What is the problem and how can you fix it?  Be sure to detail any commands  you will use or system file modifications you will make.

 

 

6.  Your company has just merged with another company.  The other other company has a UNIX system with 300 user accounts and can support a maximum of 400 users.  Your company has a UNIX system with 200 user accounts and can support 250 users.    Before the acquisition, you purchased an additional server that has a substantial amount of disk space. 

 

You boss has presented you with a challenge:  You must create a file server that will allow all users on the UNIX systems to access various shared folders and documents necessary for them to perform their job.  However, there are two caveats: 

  1. You are not allowed to purchase any additional hardware and must only use systems that you currently own.   
  2. It will be far too costly to move all users to a single unified system, as each system is configured differently and had complex software configurations on each.

 

Given the requirements above, how would you solve the problem your boss has presented to you?  Be sure to include details about system configuration and any special services you may use to solve the problem.  Be sure to note any system file configuration changes or commands you must use to implement your solution.

 

 

7.  You company uses a sophisticated system monitoring and reporting package called “Sysmon”.   After this package is installed, you can run the command “/usr/sbin/sysmon –statusreport” to print a detailed system status report to the screen.  The report may include details about overall disk usage, system kernel errors, possible security breaches, files with bad permissions, etc.

 

You work on a team of six system administrators, each of which needs to see the output of the command above when they get into the office in the morning. 

 

Your boss has directed you to configure the system so the program runs at 9:00am every day of the week and emails the output to every system administrator in the company.  There’s one important caveat:  the sysmon command above produces a report that shows statistics from the last time you ran the program.  Therefore, you can only run the program one time each day to produce the desired report that examines the past 24 hours of system activity.

 

What is the best way to go about performing this task?

 

 

8.  Practical Tasks

  1. What should you do if you forget the root password to your system?
  2. What can you do to ensure that NO NFS-related components are running on your system and that no users have the ability to mount or export NFS shared volumes?
  3. What are some of the ways you can go about changing system run levels?  Why would you ever need to change system run levels?
  4. Describe how you create a system group and add users to that group.