This document outlines which topics will be covered on the midterm 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 midterm exam will be on February 27, 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. How do servers differ from desktops?
    2. Hardware redundancy: full, n+1
    3. Blades
    4. Service requirements
    5. Service design principles
  4. Data Centers and Networks
    1. Power and cooling
    2. Racks: types, purposes
    3. Remote Access: ssh, telnet, console, KVM
    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
 

©2008 James Walden, Ph.D.