[Techtalk] Help with Linux class outline?

[Cynthia Kiser]

Quoting Leslie Vincent <lvincent at dtcc.edu>:
> The document is here:
> http://user.dtcc.edu/~lvincent/cis253proposal.doc

Looks like an interesting course. I am not sure if it would 100% fit
as a textbook for your course, but you might recommend Self-Service
Linux to your students. It is trying to be a "teach you to fish" kind
of book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013147751X And Unix Power
Tools stinks as a text book - but by the end of your course, I would
want them to be able to pick it up, poke through it, pick a tool, and
complete a task. 

Comments about the outline: 

If you want folks to know more about the Linux OS, I would suggest
installing something with less of a InstallShield style click click
click GUI installer. Perhaps Ubantu (Slackware is probably overkill on
the "do it all yourself to learn"). But if the point is a working
system so you can get on with the rest of the course, then, by all
means, use Fedora or one of the free RHEL clones (CentOS or Scientific
Linux) - unless you have a RHEL site liscence.

Week 3 looks a little light. Strategies for user/group management can
fill volumes - but folks won't have a lot of perspective on the issue
until they are trying to set up a group project with specific security
needs. Perhaps spend an hour on users/groups and spend the other 4 on
network configuration and trouble shooting - DHCP vs fixed IP, use of
nmap, traceroute, netstat, lsof. How to tell if you have a firewall
blocking your access. How to turn services on and off (stand alone
services and ones run through xinetd).

I would move the Bash stuff earlier in the course so they can have
more tools for poking around the file system. Definitely cover using
'find' and perhaps some multifile editing using perl -e -ibak

For the group project, I might suggest building a system to DO
something - for example, build a cluster of machines that all use a
common LDAP server to authenticate. (You did say these were students
who were focussing on networking) Or get some kind of LAMPish thing
running - so they have to install OS, database, web server, and
application code and permission it so that the web monkey can change
content but not change the server config files. It would be good for
them to understand dependencies and how to plan for and deal with them. 

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu