This document outlines which topics will be covered on the final exam. Some of these topics will have been covered in lecture, others are from the book, and yet others are from the labs and assignments. The final exam will be on May 5, 2008.

  1. Desktops
    1. Desktop lifecycle
    2. Automated installs
    3. Disk image vs scripted installs
    4. Updates vs Installs
    5. One, Some, Many Approach
  2. Booting and Disks
    1. UNIX boot process
    2. Run levels
    3. Configuring services: service and chkconfig
    4. Disk performance
    5. Latency vs throughput
    6. RAID: striping, parity
    7. RAID levels
    8. LVM
    9. Filesystems: inodes
  3. Servers and Services
    1. Servers vs Desktops
    2. Server Hardware: cost, reliability (hot-swap and hot-spare), performance
    3. Redundancy: full and n+1
    4. Service requirements
    5. Service design principles
  4. Data Centers and Networks
    1. Power and cooling
    2. Racks: types, purposes
    3. Remote Access: ssh (passwords and keys), telnet, console, KVM, VNC, NX
    4. Network Topologies
    5. IDFs and MDFs
  5. Package Management
    1. Why is software installation difficult?
    2. Package managers
    3. Package tools: rpm vs yum
  6. Namespaces
    1. Flat vs hierarchical
    2. Policies: selection, lifetime, scope, security
    3. UNIX accounts: /etc/{passwd,shadow,group}
    4. LDAP: directory structure, LDIF, DNs, RDNs
  7. Help Desks
    1. Size
    2. Scope
    3. Tracking requests
    4. Workflow
  8. Debugging
    1. Process: identification, reproducing the problem, forming hypotheses, testing hypotheses, executing solution, validating solution
    2. Process of Elimination
    3. Successive Refinement
  9. Change Management
    1. Processes
    2. Proposals
    3. Communication
    4. Backing Out
    5. Revision Control
  10. Upgrades and Maintenance
    1. Upgrade Procedure and Back-out Plan
    2. Maintenance windows scheduling and management
    3. Service conversion: layers vs pillars, flash cuts
    4. Centralization and de-centralization
  11. Monitoring
    1. Historical and real-time monitoring
    2. Notification
    3. Tools: syslog, logwatch, monit
  12. Performance
    1. Tuning process
    2. Resources: CPU, disks, memory, network
    3. Identifying and solving performance issues for each resource
    4. Performance monitoring: uptime, top, vmstat, iostat
  13. Storage
    1. Copying files: ftp, scp, rsync
    2. Network filesystems
    3. NFS: mount, automounter, security issues
  14. Backups
    1. Disaster recovery planning and techniques
    2. Backup decisions: why? what? where? how?
    3. Backup types: full, incremental, image, filesystem
    4. Capacity planning
    5. Backup hardware: reliability, flexibility, time to data, transfer rate, capacity, cost
    6. Backup software
    7. Automating backups: autochangers and cron
    8. Snapshots and CDP
 

©2008 James Walden, Ph.D.