Introduction & Operating Systems

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 Network management
• What’s it about?
– Originated from system administration, especially for
multi-user systems
• User/accounting management
• System/software installation and configuration
• System maintenance
– Computer networks and the Internet have broadened the
area of system administration
• Network maintenance/monitoring
• Network service installation and configuration
• Security : hosts, network, data
• Cloud management

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 Network management (cont.)
• System/network administration as a profession
– It was not a discipline, just passed on by word of mouth. But now
there is a LISA, Large Installation System Administration forum
and other conferences.
– It is about putting together a network of computers, getting them
running, and then keeping them running in spite of the activities
of users and crackers who tend to cause the systems to fail.
– System/network administrators need a broad range of
knowledge and skills. They are services providers,
mechanics, sociologists, psychologists, doctors, ...
– As a system/network administrator, no one thanks you
for what you have done but blame you when anything goes
wrong.

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 Objectives of the
•
course
Sound understanding of computer systems, networks, and their
security issues with hands- on experience
– You should understand what you are doing. It is required for stability and security
of your systems.
– IT grads requirements: system integration, scripting, fixing simple PC problems.
– Do you know how to change Linux scheduler behaviour?

• Understand and practise every aspect of system and

network administration
– Focus on principles/theories. What you do today may be different from
tomorrow, but principles survive longer.
– You should be able to propose new principles based on your experience and
expertise.
– Management theory may help.

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 Objectives of the course (cont.)
• Focus on the technical aspect of system and
network management
– The technical skills, not the administrative skills.
• Use Linux plus Ethernet plus VM as a case
study
– You will feel confident to maintain a small network of computers
based on Linux and Ethernet and can extend your knowledge to
other networks and systems.
– Linux know-how is topping most highly sought expertise
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Linux-Job-Openings-
on-the-Rise-Dice-Report-600529/.
• A place to test your practical knowledge
– If you feel you don’t understand something, you either lack the
knowledge or haven’t associated it with what you have learnt
before. Do ask questions! 5
 Resources
• Linux manual pages
– Use man and apropos commands
• Related web sites
– The Linux Document Project, http://en.tldp.org
• HOWTO documents
– Linux web site, http://www.linux.com/
– Ubuntu site, http://www.ubuntu.com/, check the archive of the
mailing lists for any problems.
– Linux kernel, http://www.kernel.org/,
http://kernelnewbies.org/
– Administrator’s forums and conferences such as USENIX, SAGE,
and LISA, http://www.usenix.org/, http://www.sage.org/
– Linux conferences such as linux.conf.au
• Maybe the above resources are obsolete, the last but
most important resort is Google
6 search!
 System administrator
• Successful Administrators
– No stereotypes. “White/black Cats Theory”
– Normally if one can keep the users happy he/she is
successful (which is very difficult).
– Life-long learning skills. One’s proud knowledge and
expertise today may be obsolete tomorrow (Be prepared
to be jobless if you do not keep learning).
• Some myths for new SAs
– There exists a right answer for every problem.
– Things should always work in the way we expect.
– Every problem should have a happy end.
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 System administrator (cont.)
• Challenges of SAs
– Not just installing system/software, also about planning and
designing an efficient community of computers.
– Design a logical and efficient network.
– Easy upgrade for a large number of computers.
– Decide what and where services are installed.
– Plan and implement security.
– Provide a comfortable/convenient environment for users.
– Develop ways of fixing problems and errors.
– Efficient administrative skills.
– Keep track of new technology and software.

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 Practice of SAs
• Common practice may not be good practice
– There are three reasons for common practice:
• Someone did it and others followed blindly;
• Believe it is good after careful thought;
• An arbitrary choice had to be made;
– Think for yourself.
– Pay attention to experts but don’t automatically believe
anyone.
– Every choice needs a reason, which is why you need to
learn this paper.

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 Practice of SAs (cont.)
• Good practices
– Look for answers in manuals, newsgroups, and archive
of mailing lists. Usually “google” helps for most
common problems.
– Use controlled trial and error for diagnosis.
– Listen to people who tell us there is a problem. It might
be true.
– Write down problems and solutions in a log book, and
write down experiences (highly recommended).
– Take responsibilities for our actions.
– Remember to tidy things up regularly.
– After learning something new, ask yourself “How does
this apply to my work?”
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 Superuser
• Superuser (root)
– What is root (superuser)? A user that has privileges to
access/modify all resources of a computer system.
– Be aware of the double-edged sword
• Convenient to do anything
• Powerful enough to damage the system
• Login as superuser (root)
– System admins should never login as root
• Many commands can be executed by ordinary users
– When you need root privilege
• Use sudo or sudo -s or su
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 Linux commands/syscalls today
• > man apropos
• > apropos scheduler
• > which nice
• > nice
• sched_setscheduler()
• nice(), getpriority(), setpriority()
• capget(), capset()
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 Summary
• What is a superuser (root user)?
• What is the safest way to access
root privilege?

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Overview of Operating System

This is optional and useful if

you forget concepts of OS.

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 Computer Architecture
• Computer architecture

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 Computer Architecture (cont.)
• CPU
– does arithmetic and logic operations
– Executes instructions
• Memory
– stores instructions and data, e.g. programs
– How does CPU access memory?
• I/O devices
– e.g. hard disks, monitor, CD-ROM
– have a control card communicating with CPU through buses (ISA, PCI,
USB)
– How does CPU control I/O devices?
– Interrupts/traps and registers
• How does a program get started?

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 Origin of OS
• From where to load a program into the memory in
the past?
– Punch cards, punch tapes, hard disks
• How to load a program in the early days?
– A loading program is written to read cards/tapes and
then store the instructions into the memory
– One of the first device drivers
• Every programmer had to write the loading
program!
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 Operating
•
System
Why not share the same loading program among the
programmers?
– The initial motivation for writing a piece of OS
• What is OS?
– Includes kernel and many system programs
– One or more programs which can be reused to conveniently use/share
computer resources such as I/O devices
– Control program
– Wrapper
– Resource allocator
– Lazy government
– Service provider

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 OS concepts
• OS kernel
– Provide the most basic and generic functionality
– Handle resource sharing and I/O devices
– Can only be used by system calls
• System calls
– Used to get services from OS
• Routines/kernel functions
– For system calls and interrupts

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 OS concepts (cont.)
• Daemons/servers
– Achieves the functions of OS but running as a user program providing a
service
– Keep the OS kernel as small as possible
– E.g. sshd, syslogd, named, crond
• Command shell
– A user interface based on command line
– A layer of software which wraps the OS kernel in more acceptable
clothes
– Allows users to interact with the machine, e.g. manipulate files, and run
programs
– Interpret scripts, e.g. Bourne shell, Bourne Again SHell (BASH), C shell,
Python, Perl...

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 Shell programming
•
(scripting)
Why shell programming?
– It is essential for system administrators (SAs)
– Many administrative programs are written in scripts
– The syntax is simple and easy to learn and understand
– Quickly prototype a complex application
– When efficiency and performance are essential, don’t
use shell scripts
• BASH(Bourne Again Shell)
– Extended from the classic Bourne shell and Korn
shell
– A de facto standard for scripting on UNIX
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 Processes
• Process
– A program which is being executed
– Consists of program and its running state
• Why processes?
– For convenient resource sharing
– Time sharing: processes take turns to be executed
• Tasks/jobs/threads
• Scheduling of processes
– Round-robin/queueing
– Preemptive/non-preemptive

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 Processes (cont.)
• Context switching
– Restore the state of a process when it is scheduled to
run
– The state of each process is described by a data
structure called process control block (PCB)
• Inter-process communication
– Pipes: enables one process to open another process as if
it were a file for writing or reading, e.g. ls -l | more
– Sockets: IP domain or Unix domain
– Data sharing and synchronisation

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 Processes (cont.)
• Process creation
– fork(), wait(), and exec()
– Parent and child processes
• Process scheduling state
– Ready: in line to be executed
– Running: active
– Waiting: sleeping or suspended
– Terminated: defunct/zombie
• Deadlock
– Due to resource sharing and waiting among processes

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 Memory
• RAM/ROM
system
• Paging
– Divided into pages, e.g. 4096 (4k) bytes
– Addressing: page_id + offset
• Logical memory
– To protect each program’s memory space, logical
memory space is used for each program
– Each program has its own separate logical memory
space starting at address zero, divided into code and
data segment

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 Memory system (cont.)
• Logical vs. Physical memory
– There is a mapping mechanism from logical to physical
memory space. It is called a page table. It is loaded as
part of the context switching
– malloc() and free() to allocate and free logical
memory.
– The figure below shows the relationship between
segments, logical pages, and physical page frames.

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 Memory system (cont.)
• Virtual memory
– A way of making the physical memory of a computer effectively
larger than it really is.
– Disk space (swap space) is used to store memory pages
– Swapping: an entire process, including code and data, is expunged
from memory
– Paging: only some single pages are swapped out
• Page faults
– Occurs when a page is not in the memory
– When a page fault happens, the involved page has to be brought in
from disk space.

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 Memory system (cont.)
• Paging strategies
– When a page fault occurs, some page in memory has to
be shifted out
– FIFO
– LRU
• Thrashing
– a state where there are so many processes competing
for limited resources that it spends more time servicing
page faults and swapping in and out processes than it
does executing the processes

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 I/O system
• I/O devices are handled with drivers
– Drivers provide functions of device operations under a
standard interface (a file) to user programs, e.g., open(),
read(), and write().
– Devices are operated by reading from/writing into I/O
memory or ports
– Drivers may be loaded as modules in Linux
• Character and block devices
– Depend on if data are manipulated as a stream of bytes
or blocks. Block buffer are used for block devices
• Synchronous and Asynchronous I/O
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 I/O system (cont.)
• Interrupts are used for devices with asynchronous
I/O
– A small piece of code in OS is used to handle each
interrupt
– Interrupt vector: contains addresses of the interrupt
routines
– Direct Memory Access (DMA): a device which copies
blocks of data at a time from one place to the other,
without the intervention of the CPU.
• Very high speed devices could place heavy demands on the
CPU if they relied on the CPU to copy data word by word.

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 File system
• File system
– To directly operate disks (block devices) is troublesome
and complicated
– A file is a good abstraction for data stored on block
devices
– A file system is a high level interface to block devices
such as disks. It consists of methods and data structures
that an operating system uses to keep track of files on a
disk
– There are many different file systems, e.g. Linux
supports ext2, fat, nfs, iso9660, …
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 Linux OS
• A member of the UNIX family
– Inspired by MINIX
– Initially developed by Linus Torvalds, but contributed
by hundreds of developers around the world
– Linux source code is under GNU General Public
License, which is open to anyone to study
• Linux OS kernel
– A true UNIX kernel, but not a full UNIX OS, as it
doesn’t include all applications such as windowing
systems, compilers, and text editors which are available
under the GNU license
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 Linux OS (cont.)
• Characteristics of Linux OS
– A monolithic kernel
– Supports kernel modules
– Multithreading
– Preemptive for 2.6 (but non-preemptive for earlier
versions)
– Multiprocessor support
– Reconfigurable kernel
• Linux version
– X.Y.ZZ - X.Y identifies the version number, ZZ
is the release number. If Y is an even number, the
version is a
stable version.
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