If the student is unfamiliar with UNIX, it would be worthwhile to brush up on the basics of UNIX. Many of the books listed here may be a good reference to read. Once again, the class will hopefully be taught in an operating system independent manner, but a good familiarity with UNIX will most certainly help.
If you have any concerns in this area, please feel free to
contact me.
References
Jargon
The world of System Administration has, like any other profession, its
own jargon and techspeak used to make communication simpler and more
precise. Students in this course may want to familiarize themselves
with the language if necessary. The
Jargon File contains
much of the language used by computer professionals, as well as a lot
of slang also often used by computer professionals.
The computer field, as with most fields, is replete with acronyms. A
good site for looking these up are
Acronym Finder.
Books
The class has no required book. I
have yet to find one that has what I want. If you are looking for a
good systems administration reference book, I would suggest one of the
following. Each one is useful in its own way, and together they make
a good library of documentation.
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| USENIX The Advanced Computing Systems Associations | Conferences, |
| SAGE System Administrators Guild | LISA Conference, Sysadmin docs, Salary Profiles |
| SANS System Administration, Networking, and Security Institute | Conferences, Publications, Publications, SNAP Training |
| ACM Association for Computing Machinery | Conferences, Publications, Competitions, SIGs |
| IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. | Publications, Standards, Conferences |
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| USENET FAQ archive ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/ | FAQs, charters, and archives of USENET newsgroups |
| RFC and Internet draft archive http://www.ietf.org/ | The Internet Engineering Task Force |
| USENIX/SAGE http://www.usenix.org/sage/ | System Administrator's Guild |
| USENIX/SAGE job-descriptions http://www.usenix.org/sage/jobs/jobs-descriptions.html | Good job descriptions and things to look for in a good sysadmin |
| UITS PICS EdCert Indiana University Education and Certification Program | Classes offered by IU on Windows NT and UNIX System Administration |
| Univ. Maryland, Baltimore http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~jack/ifsm498d/ | old (1995) Introduction to Unix Systems Administration class. |
| Univ. Washington, Seattle http://www.washington.edu/R870/R870.html | Unix System Administration - A Survival Course |
| Unix Guru Universe http://www.ugu.com/ | An informal collection of UNIX information by System Administrators. |
| FOLDOC http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/ | Free on-line dictionary of computing. |
| CERIAS http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/ | Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security |
| UNIX SA class http://www.datawire.com/saclass/ | Class can be taken live, or over the Internet. |
| The Tao of Backup http://www.rocksoft.com/taobackup/ | Amusing yet informative introduction to making backups. |
| SysAdmin Magazine http://www.samag.com/ | Bi-monthly magazine for System Administrators. |
Go over good/bad books and magazines.
Say you have to configure ftpd on a machine but you don't know how.
What do you do?
Ask someone
Another sysadmin
tech support
on a newsgroup or maillist
online docs
man pages
texinfo/info
howto's
books
vendor documentation
3rd party
magazines
papers/articles
WWW
search engines
rtfm/faq.org
ldp
ietf (rfc)
Usenet/maillists/irc/icq
Peek and Poke
read the code
tinker/debug
look on another machine
Finally, when you do find the docs/solution you need, save them.
You will almost certainly need them again.