System and Network Administration

• art of "keeping things running"
• really the art of "managing complex systems and interactions".
• "there's always a future in Computer Maintenance" (Frank Zappa, Deteriorada)

System Administration

• building a system.
• maintenance and upgrades.
• troubleshooting and debugging.
• aiding users.

Network Administration

• providing connectivity.
• providing network services.
• troubleshooting and debugging.
• aiding users.

My Personal Biases

• (and the key theme at Sysadmin Conferences)
• Network administration is the art of connecting people, (and incidentally connecting their computers)
• Sound administration flows from reasoned POLICY DECISIONS (regarding what is important and what isn't)
• My research: make policy decisions, once made, easier to enforce.

A running joke

• the 9 layers of the OSI reference model:

  Political Layer	how devices agree on how to get money.
  Financial Layer	how devices agree on what to spend.
  Application Layer	how devices agree on the meaning of data.
  Presentation Layer	how devices agree on the format of data.
  Session Layer	how neighboring devices establish channels of info.
  Transport Layer	how to avoid communication errors between devices.
  Network Layer	how non-neighboring devices communicate.
  Data Link Layer	how neighboring devices communicate.
  Physical Layer	how devices are physically connected.

UNIX

• developed at AT&T Bell Labs and University of Calif. at Berkeley (UCB)
• many flavors:
  • System-V (AT&T SysV)
    • Solaris (Andante)
    • OSF4 (Emerald)
  • Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD)
    • SunOs (Solaris predecessor)
    • FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSDi
  • Linux (Linus Torvalds)
    • Sort of BSD
    • with SysV extensions
    • flavors
      • RedHat (choice for this course)
      • SuSE (Germany)
      • Slackware

In this course

• we talk about Solaris and Linux.
• First, Solaris (what you've been using)