| Instructor: | Dr. A. Miner |
|---|---|
| Office: | 233 Atanasoff Hall |
| Office Hours: | MW 16:30 - 17:00, T 14:00 - 15:30, and by appointment |
| Lecture: | TR 13:10 - 14:00, Gilman 1104 |
| Text: | A Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux, Third edition by Mark Sobell (ISBN 0-13-228027-2) |
| Lab room: | Pearson 0113 |
| Lab section 1: | T 14:10 - 16:00 |
| Lab section 2: | R 14:10 - 16:00 |
| Lab section 3: | W 10:00 - 11:50 |
| Lab assistant 1: | Santosh Panchapakesan |
| Email: | santosh@cs.iastate.edu |
| Office Hours: | TR 11:00 - 12:00, Pearson 0112 |
| Lab assistant 2: | Bin Tong |
| Email: | tongbin@cs.iastate.edu |
| Office Hours: | W 16:00 - 17:00, Pearson 0112 |
This is a hands-on course designed to demonstrate the installation, administration, and utilization of the Linux operating system for a personal computer. A secondary focus of the course is on interoperability of Linux with Windows. It is a three-credit course, with 2 hours of lecture and 2 hours of lab each week.
The objective of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the Linux operating system. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to create a dual-boot (Windows and Linux) PC and successfully perform system and network administration tasks, such as installing packages, managing services, and creating a network of communicating Windows and Linux machines.
If you have a disability that may require some modification of seating, testing, or other class requirements, please obtain a SAAR (Student Academic Accommodation Request) form verifying your disability and specifying the accommodation you will need from the Disability Resources staff and present it to the instructor as soon as possible so that appropriate arrangements may be made.
Students are strongly encouraged to maintain a lab notebook with detailed notes of the steps taken during labs, and the outcome of the steps. Lab will consist of a series of self-contained lab activities, each of which will require somewhere between 1 and perhaps 5 hours to complete (so several lab sessions may be required). Each student will prepare a written lab report for each lab activity, which documents the detailed steps taken to complete the lab, including (fragments of) configuration files and other useful details about the system (e.g., "we set up the following drive partitions:"). Any problems encountered, and their solutions, should be documented in the written lab reports. In summary, the reports should contain enough detail so that another student in the class could follow the steps and achieve the same results, much like a HOWTO. Lab reports are due by 11:59 pm on their due date, and will be subject to a 10% penalty per day late. The lab reports will make up roughly 30% of your overall grade.
Many lab activities will require group effort. In these cases, actions should be shared among each group member, with priority given to those with least experience. You may share lab notes (i.e., one student documents while another student types) in this case, but each student will still turn in his or her own written lab report. As such, copying of lab reports is PROHIBITED.
Homework will be assigned periodically, and will often be closely related to lab work. Homework solutions are due by 11:59 pm on their due date, and will be subject to a 10% penalty per day late. Homework is worth roughly 20% of your overall grade.
There will be one midterm exam, held in class, sometime in October. The exam will be open note, open textbook, open lab notebook, closed computer. This makes up roughly 20% of your overall grade.
There will be a 2-hour, in-class final exam, held at the University-scheduled time slot: Friday, December 15, 9:45 - 11:45. This is worth roughly 30% of your overall grade. The exam is open note, open textbook, open lab notebook, closed computer.
Students enrolled in Computer Science courses at ISU are expected to maintain the highest standards of academic integrity. Cases of cheating that go undetected and hence unpunished skew the grading curve in a class, thereby lowering the grades for students who do not cheat. Students who cheat rob themselves not only of knowledge and skills that they should have acquired in a course, but also of the experience of learning how to learn, arguably the most valuable benefit of a university education. The reputation of the department, the university, and the value of the degree suffer if employers find the graduates of a program lacking in abilities that successful completion specific courses should guarantee. Most professions, including Computer Science, have codes of ethics or standards to which individuals will be expected to abide by. At the University you practice the integrity that you must demonstrate later.
Suspected cases of academic misconduct will be pursued fully in accordance with ISU policies which require that all suspected cases of academic misconduct be reported to the dean of students. Any student found responsible for academic misconduct will receive a failing grade (F) in the course (even if the student chooses to drop the course). The dean of students may impose additional sanctions (ranging from a disciplinary reprimand to expulsion from the university). You are strongly urged to consult the university's policy on academic dishonesty.
The information included here is intended to help students avoid unintentionally committing academic dishonesty. The primary purpose of problem sets is to clarify and enhance the understanding of the concepts covered in the lectures. Past experience with this course has shown that this is helped by increased interaction among students. Discussion of general concepts and questions concerning the homework and laboratory assignments among students is encouraged. However, it is expected that you have independently arrived at solutions that you submit. The following are examples of activities that are PROHIBITED:
The following is a rough and tentative schedule of lecture topics and reading assignments.
| 22,24 August: | Introduction; History of Linux and GNU |
| Read Chapter 1 | |
| 29,31 August: | Hardware; Drives and partitions; Filesystems; Boot sequence |
| Read Chapters 2 and 3 | |
| 5, 7 September: | Linux filesystem; Shells and basic utilities |
| Read Chapters 5 and 6 | |
| 12, 14 September: | No Lectures! |
| 19, 21 September: | Links, permissions, times; Job control |
| 26, 28 September: | Processes; Installing packages from source code |
| 3, 5 October: | Networks; client-server; ssh; NFS |
| Read Chapter 10 | |
| 10, 12 October: | NIS; Users and groups; Samba; Apache |
| 17 October: | Midterm Exam |
| 19 October: | More shell fun (redirection and pipes) |
| Read Chapter 7 | |
| 24 October: | Basic filtering utilities |
| 26, 31 October: | Simple shell scripts; shell variables |
| Read Chapter 9 | |
| 2, 7 November: | Linux kernel; rebuilding the kernel |
| 9, 14 November: | Primer on UNIX powertools: regular expressions, grep, sed, awk |
| See appendix A for regular expressions | |
| 16, 28 November: | Bash programming |
| Read Chapter 28 | |
| 30 November; 5, 7 December: | Security |
| See appendix C |
The following is the schedule of lab exercises. Note: the first week of lab is the week of 28 August (i.e., no labs the first week of classes).
| Lab 1: | Assemble a PC | Due: 5 September |
|---|---|---|
| Lab 2: | Install operating systems | Due: 19 September |
| Lab 3: | Microsoft Office vs. Open Office | Due: 26 September |
| fpda-appl-form.pdf | ||
| fpda-appl-form.doc | ||
| SF424-ISU-template.doc | ||
| FallSchedule.xls | ||
| NsfBudget.xls | ||
| NGS.ppt | ||
| Lab 4: | Processes and daemons | Due: 3 October |
| Lab 5: | Installing packages from source | Due: 13 October |
| cNibbles-2.0.0.tbz | ||
| tgif-QPL-4.1.45.tar.bz2 | ||
| xearth-1.1.tar.gz | ||
| oneko-1.1b.tar.gz | ||
| Lab 6: | UNIX networking (ssh, NFS, NIS) | Due: 3 November |
| Lab 7: | Windows file sharing with Samba | Due: 10 November |
| Lab 8: | Apache web server | Due: 17 November |
| Lab 9: | Build a kernel | Due: 1 December |
| Homework 1: | Due: 28 September |
|---|---|
| Homework 2: | Due: 2 November |
| Homework 3: | Due: 9 November |
| Homework 4: | Due: 16 November |
| Homework 5: | Due: 30 November |
[1] The academic honesty policy has been compiled using material adapted from several sources including the past offerings of this course, other computer science courses at Iowa State University, as well as other universities.