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System Admin Notes

System administration involves installing, configuring, and managing computer systems and peripherals. The goals are to make systems reliable, easy to use, and meet user needs. Key duties include system installation, user account administration, backups, software/patch installation, performance monitoring, security administration, documentation, and user support. Certification and documentation are important for standardization and professionalism in system administration as it matures as an engineering discipline.

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3K views35 pages

System Admin Notes

System administration involves installing, configuring, and managing computer systems and peripherals. The goals are to make systems reliable, easy to use, and meet user needs. Key duties include system installation, user account administration, backups, software/patch installation, performance monitoring, security administration, documentation, and user support. Certification and documentation are important for standardization and professionalism in system administration as it matures as an engineering discipline.

Uploaded by

Susan
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© © All Rights Reserved
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System Administration

and other stuff

Andy Steingruebl
[email protected]
Goals
The goals of this lecture are to
_ Give you a basic understanding of the purpose and
scope of system administration.
_ Teach you the basic duties of the system
administrator.
_ Relate system administration to other IT work. How
the system administrator relates to
" Management
" Users
System Administration
Definition
System administration is the practice of installin
configuring, and managing computer systems an
their associated peripherals.
The goal of system administration is to configur
a system that is reliable, easy to use, and serves
the need of the intended users.
_ Except for their own desktop, system administrators
are not setting up machines for themselves.
System administration as a discipline is
somewhere between engineering and art.
Definition
System administration is about putting together
network of computers ... getting them running a
then keeping them running in spite of the
activities of users who tend to cause the systems
to fail. - Mark Burgess
System Administrator Duties
The basic duties of the system administrator are
_ System installation
_ Administering user accounts
_ Performing Backups
_ Installing software and patches
_ Monitoring, capacity planning, performance tuning
_ Security Administration and Audit
_ Documentation
_ Helping users
_ Storage Administration
* List partially taken from Nemeth – purple book.
References at end.
Principles
Automate whenever possible
_ Who likes doing the same manual labor over and ov
again?
Keep good records/documentation
_ Or, don't get hit by a bus and be an indentured
servant.
Simplify
_ Complex systems are less reliable, harder to manage
and wake you up with a failure at 2am.
Systems and IT are not an end in themselves.
System Installation
What operating system do I want to install?
What components do I want to install?
_ Why?
_ Do I need all of them? Installed but unused software
can become a maintenance burden and security
liability.
How do I want to configure the disk?
Account Administration
Who should have an account on the machine?
_ Policy?
What permissions should they have?
_ Administrator, regular user, read-only?
System Policies
_ Password composition, expiration?
_ Accounts on all machines, or limited to only certain
systems?
Backups
Policy
_ What to back up, and for how long?
_ Legal requirements?
" Retention of certain types of information?
_ Specific business requirements
" Document retention policy
" Electronic "shredding"
Backups – continued
A lot more complicated than it seems at first.
_ How do we get a stable copy of files that change all
the time?
_ How do we back up large amounts of data?
" Lots of tapes and lots of drives
" Lots of network traffic?
" Local tapes on each machine = operators on roller skates
Storage
SCSI vs. IDE
SANS
NAS
How do I pick?
How do I allocate, manage, report on, capacity
plan?
Storage Interfaces/Buses
IDE
_ Integrated Drive Electronics
_ 1 bus can have 2 devices. Master and Slave.
_ Only 1 device can talk at once.
_ Commodity storage bus.
_ Not good for high I/O rates. Does not scale well
_ Fastest drives available are 7200RPM.
SCSI
SCSI
_ Small Computer Systems Interface
_ A communications bus for disks.
_ Great table of bus speeds at
http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/s/scsi.html
_ SCSI supports multiple simultaneous transfers.
_ Fastest drives are 15,000RPM.
_ Drives are intelligent. They can often re-order
transactions to get best performance based on locati
of drive head and platter.
Storage – New Directions
SCSI and IDE are both parallel technologies.
_ Parallel interfaces suffer from problems of "skew"
" http://www.yale.edu/pclt/PCHW/IDESCSI.HTM has a
good picture of this.
Higher speed electronics allow us to implement
Serial technologies. Serial technologies do not
suffer from skew problems.
_ Fibre-Channel
_ FireWire (IEEE 1394)
_ USB-2.0
_ SerialATA
Storage Area Networks (SANS)
Storage Area Networks are networks that move
disk blocks as their main data elements.
_ Fibre-channel
" 1 or 2 Gigabit/sec transport
_ 100/200 Megabyte/sec
" Can run over copper or fiber-optic cabling.
" Fibre-channel is a data-link layer. Multiple network-laye
protocols are defined.
_ SCSI
_ IP
" Tanenbaum pages 326-327.
_ ISCSI
" SCSI transported over IP.
SANS – continued
Why SANS?
_ Allow us to share disks between many machines.
_ Virtualized storage. Allows us to dynamically
grow/shrink/partition storage resources between
systems.
" Treat Storage as a network-wide resource/utility.
" Storage modeled as electricity or bandwidth.
_ Higher performance
_ Improved topology
" Improved Fault Tolerance/Disaster Recovery
Network Attached Storage
Network Attached Storage is a paradigm for
accessing file data over a network.
_ NFS
_ CIFS
_ AFS
Used extensively in client-server computing.
Usually a many -> one relationship between
client and server.
NAS Continued
Semantics of NAS are File/Offset.

_ NAS protocols are filesystems


_ Filesystem to client is virtually indistinguishable fro
local filesystem.
_ Server handles concurrent access, locking,
permissions.
_ Server "owns" the filesystem
SAN vs. NAS
Semantics
_ Semantics of SAN are disk block
_ Semantics of NAS are File/Offset
Filesystem
_ SAN – each machine owns their filesystem on disk.
" No standards for sharing filesystems.
_ NAS – server owns the filesystem.
" Arbitrates locks/concurrent access, permissions.
SAN vs. NAS
Which to Pick?
SAN
_ Choose when you need block-level semantics.
" Database
_ When each filesystem will be used by only one serv
NAS
_ Choose when you need file/offset semantics.
" Fileserver
" Shared web storage repository
_ When you need concurrent access by multiple
systems to the same data.
Security
System administrators touch on security all of th
time.
_ Authentication
_ Authorization
_ Audit
_ Confidentiality
_ Integrity
_ Availability
Security
Audit is the most often overlooked component o
security.
_ System logs are critical
_ Almost all server operating systems can generate
audit logs.
" You just have to be a wizard to understand most of them
Audit Techniques
Sherlock Holmes approach
_ Rule out everything that isn't a possibility. Anything
left is suspicious.
Log files tend to have patterns.
_ Remove known-good patterns
_ Look through remaining logs for things that are
suspicious.
_ Add known-good patterns to known-good list
_ Repeat
This process can take up to two weeks on a busy
network.
Have patience. This process is worth the time spent
Installing Software and Patches
A main activity of the system administrator is
configuring additional software for use by users
_ Databases
_ Programming tools
_ Servers
" Webserver
" Application Server
" Email
Patching
All systems have bugs
_ Some more than others
Patching systems can be a full time job
_ Unless you automate
_ But, patches can themselves break things. Don't wan
to automate
_ Catch-22
User Support
Depending on the organization, the system
administrator must interact extensively with the
user community.
This is often the greatest challenge for the system
administrator.
_ System administrators often have a hard time
understanding user problems.
_ Users aren't very good at explaining problems.
" The network is down
_ = I can't read my email
_ = I can't get to cnn.com
A Model for User Support
Greg Jackson wrote an interesting article in this
_ http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0151.pd
Its all about speaking the same language, and
understanding the problem from the non-IT
perspective.
User Support
Teach Them to Fish
Give users the tools to help themselves.
_ Good log messages
_ A website or telephone status line that tells people
what systems are up and which are down.
Certification
A very contentious subject
_ Many believe that certifications don't demonstrate r
knowledge, skills, ability.
_ Certifications often very vendor dependent, cost a lo
of money.
_ MCSE's (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) are
not guaranteed to be skilled.
" MCSE is a paper-only test. It does not test applied skills.
_ Still, there is a need for measurable skills.
Certification – continued
As system administration progresses from an
"art" to an engineering discipline, there is a need
for:
_ Standardization
_ Discipline
_ Consistency
_ Assurance
Certification – cont.
What other professions have certification?
_ Doctors
_ Lawyers
_ Engineers
_ Architects
Why?
_ Safety concerns
_ Professionalism
_ A way for the government to regulate
Certification
SAGE has had system administrator job
descriptions for a long time.
SAGE is now releasing a quality system
administrator certification.
_ Paper component
_ Applied component
SANS has their GIAC certifications
Both of these follow the CISCO model for CCIE
Documentation
Documentation is a critical part of system
administration. Its also the most often overlooke
Documenting what you do is a large part of bein
a professional.
_ You are being paid to do it.
_ Your employer expects it.
_ It is your duty
It might even be a legal requirement.
_ Quality systems as defined by the FDA
Documentation – Change Control
Change Control
_ Process is your friend.
_ It lets other people know you are a professional that
plans
_ It sets expectations
_ It is self-documenting. Following change control
processes allows you to go back and see what you'v
done.
_ Revision control
References
Unix System Administration Handbook- Third
Edition. Nemeth, Evi; et al. (Purple Book) 2001
The Practice of System and Network
Administration. Limoncelli, Thomas. 2001
Principles of Network and System
Administration. Burgess, Mark. 2000
SAGE. System Administrators Guild.
http://www.usenix.org/sage

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