Background

Table of contents:

Background

The Labs are designed around a fictitious company (called Example Inc.). Example Inc. has offices all over the world. Example Inc. makes widgets. The company has all the usual bells and whistles that a modern company requires to conduct its business. They have networked branch offices, with computers that perform different roles. Some of the computers are workstations, some are firewalls and some are servers (file servers, web servers, mail servers, database servers, application servers, dialup servers etc). And most importantly to us in this manual – the company has administrators to administer/manage the computers. You the reader will be the administrator at one of the branch offices.

You will be working with a partner (who is also an administrator) to make sure that the company’s computer systems are up and running all the time. Example Inc. deploys Fedora™ version of Linux on its systems.

Installation CD’s containing source files or binaries might be provided, by the instructor but in labs where the CD’s do not contain the files needed, the instructor computer will have shared directories that contain programs, patches and files that support some of the labs.

Most tasks that can be accomplished from the command line (the shell) of the Linux OS can be easily accomplished from the graphical user interface (GUI) of the operating system. But most of your work will be done from the command line in this manual. The idea is to get you very comfortable with the command line – after which there will be no task you can not perform from the command line. The command line is a very fast way to get things done and it is also one of the features of Linux (besides the Kernel) that you will find remains consistent in its look, feel and functionality amongst the various flavors of Linux.

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