linux Lpi

• Advanced computer literacy
• Basic understanding of TCP/IP networking concepts
• A minimum of three months practical experience using Linux or Unix
• A willingness to learn and use command line applications
• A commitment to further practice and exam preparation if LPI certification is your goal

As with all of our Unix/Linux courses, this course makes extensive use of practical exercises and draws heavily on our trainers own experience of implementing Unix and Linux based e-commerce solutions.

This is an instructor-led Linux course. It is primarily designed as a publicly scheduled Linux course for individuals. It can, however, be delivered as in-house / onsite Linux training for corporate groups.

• INTRODUCTION
• What Linux is, Unix philosophy
• Logging in, typing commands, logging out
• Files, directories and paths
• Creating files with a text editor
• Viewing files (cat, less)
• Managing files (cp, mv, rm)
• Magic dot files and hidden files
• Managing directories (mkdir, rmdir)
• Documentation for commands (man)
• Useful shell features (command-line editing,
  command line completion, history)

• Running commands at particular times (at, atq, atrm)
• Scheduling commands to run repeatedly (cron)
• Different ways of configuring cron (/etc/crontab, etc)
• User crontabs (crontab command)
• Configuring logging (syslog, /etc/syslog.conf)
• Examining logs (less, grep, tail -f)
• Log rotation (logrotate)
• Backup strategy and media
• Using tar to make, examine and extract archives
• Accessing tape drives, using tar with tapes

• Unix shells (bash)
• Command line syntax (options, arguments)
• Different ways of configuring cron (/etc/crontab, etc)
• Shell variables and environment variables
• Command substitution
• Using pipes to connect programs
• Useful text filters (wc, sort, uniq, expand, head, tail, nl, tac)
• Spitting files across disks (split)
• Using redirection to connect programs to files
• Redirect into files with append (>>)

• Searching files with regular expressions (grep)
• The concept of pattern matching with regular expressions
• Anchor the pattern to the start of end of the line (^, $)
• Match repeated patterns (*, \+, ?)
• Escaping special characters in regexps (\)
• Matching any character (.)
• Matching alternative patterns (\|)
• Simple use of sed to search and replace

• The unfortunate diversity of Linux documentation
• Using man(1)
• How manpages are divided among sections
• Searching for man pages (apropos, man -k)
• Printing man pages (man -t)
• Documentation for shell builtins (help)
• Using GNU info documentation (info)
• Documentation under /usr/share/doc

• Unix is all about text
• Vi: the standard Unix editor
• The concept of modes in a modal editor
• Vi clones, extensions to vi
• Other powerful Unix text editors
• Practical work learning Vi and Vim

• What processes are
• The properties of a process
• Parent processes and child processes
• Job control (fg, bg, jobs)
• Suspending processes (Ctrl+Z)
• Running programs in the background (&)
• Long-lived processes (nohup)
• Monitoring processes (ps, pstree, top)
• Killing processes and sending signals a process (kill, killall, xkill)
• Process niceness/priority (nice, renice)

• The unified Unix filesystem
• Special file types
• Symbolic links (ln -s)
• Inodes and directory entries
• Hard linksv
• Preserving links while copying and archiving
• Where to put things: the FHS

• Users and groups
• The root user, or superuser
• Changing file ownership (chown)
• Changing file group ownership (chgrp)
• More complex ways of changing ownership (recursively, changing owner and group simultaneously)
• Permissions on files
• Permissions on directories
• How permissions are applied
• Changing permissions (chmod)
• The special sticky bit mode on directories
• Setgid and setuid permissions, their effect on files and directories
• Default permissions for new files (umask)

• Disks, partitions, individual filesystems and filesystem types
• Naming of disk and partition devices (/dev/hda, etc)
• Creating and deleting partitions (fdisk)
• Mounting and unmounting filesystems (mount, umount)
• Checking available free space and space used by files (df, du)
• Checking and correcting the integrity of filesystems (fsck)
• Journaling filesystems, converting from ext2 to ext3

• The boot process: from BIOS to kernel to userspace
• Setting kernel parameters
• Configuring a boot loader: LILO and Grub
• Runlevels and init scripts
• Configuring services to run at boot
• Securing single-user mode (sulogin)
• Shutting down and rebooting the system

• Configuration files
• Environment variables for configuration (PATH, PS1, DISPLAY, http_proxy)
• Setting and examining shell aliases
• Configuring the readline library (inputrc files)
• User database files (/etc/passwd, /etc/group, etc)
• Changing passwords (passwd)
• Adding users (useradd, adduser)
• Deleting and modifying user accounts (userdel, usermod)
• Locking and unlocking user accounts

• Managing software installation (advantages of package management)
• Debian package management:
• • Package naming and version numbering
  • Searching for packages (apt-cache)
  • Using Apt to get and install packages (apt-get)
  • Low-level package management (dpkg)
• Red Hat package management:
• • Installing and upgrading RPM packages (rpm)
  • Which packages are installed, which package a file came from
  • Examining RPM package files
  • Verifying integrity of the installation
• Compiling and installing software from source code (./configure, make, etc)
• Managing shared libraries (ldd, ldconfig)

• What the kernel is and does
• Kernel modules (lsmod, modprobe, rmmod)
• Module dependencies (depmod)
• Examining modules (modinfo)
• Configuring kernel modules (/etc/modules.conf)
• Recompiling the kernel
• Configuring, compiling and installing the kernel and modules (make menuconfig, make xconfig, etc)
• Loading and unloading kernel modules (lsmod, modprobe, rmmod)

• What X is
• The role of window managers and desktop environments
• Startup and session scripts
• Terminal emulators (xterm, etc)

• Quoting (single quotes, double quotes, backslashes)
• Combining quoting mechanisms
• Globbing patterns (*, ?, [])
• Generating filenames and other text with {} braces

• The point of shell programming
• The she-bang line (#!/bin/sh)
• Outputting text with (echo)
• Reading input (read)
• Writing simple shell functions
• Sourcing files
• Command substitution again
• Conditional execution (||, &&, if, else)
• Looping (for, while, seq)
• Infinite loops (while true)
• Testing for the existence and type of files (-f, -d, etc)
• Sending email from scripts (mail)

• Overview of modern TCP/IP networking, roles of IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP
• Domain names and IP addresses (host, dig)
• Port numbers (/etc/services)
• Network interfaces (ifconfig, ifup, ifdown)
• Kernel routing tables (route)
• Finding and setting the hostname (hostname, /etc/hostname)
• DHCP client hosts
• Network diagnostics (ping, traceroute, netstat)

• Overview of network services under Linux, operating daemons
• Sending signals to daemons
• The advantages and disadvantages of using Inetd and Xinetd, basic configuration of both

• Configuring the resolver libraries
• Structure of domain names, registering names (whois)
• Running a DNS server (BIND), setting up a caching-only name server
• Running an MTA (email server)
• Email clients (MUAs)
• Basic configuration of Exim
• Routing mail with MX (mail exchanger) DNS records

• Running a webserver (Apache)
• Configuration files for Apache
• Named virtual hosts
• Options available for dynamic pages
• Logging in Apache

• Configuring NFS (/etc/exports, /etc/fstab)
• Basic Samba configuration (smb.conf, SWAT)