Advance Red Hat Linux System Administration (Version RHEL 6)

Audience:

IT professionals who have basic and intermediate level Red Hat System Administration knowledge and want the skills to be full-time enterprise Advance Linux administrators

Course Objective:

By the end of this course, candidates will be able to administer and troubleshoot file systems and partitioning, logical volume management, access control, and package management. 

Candidate will also get knowledge of automated installations, command line access, network configuration and troubleshooting, LVM & RAID administration, implementation of NFS, CIFS & autofs, managing user accounts, network user accounts with LDAP, managing SELinux, managing installed services like DNS/DHCP/HTTP, log management, hard disk health check, managing processes, tuning and maintaining the Kernel and System Recovery Techniques.

In addition this course will also discuss about Linux Security Model (IPtables, TCP Wrapper, PAM), Scripting basics (Perl/Python), Linux Virtualization and new features of RHEL 6.

 Prerequisites:

 RHCE level knowledge

Course Outline:

 DAY 1:

Unit 1: Automated Installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

-Objectives: Create and manage Kickstart configuration files; perform installations using Kickstart

b) Explain Major version upgrade and minor version upgrade

c) Discuss about the tools available for Server deployment(Cobbler, RHN, Spacewalk etc..)

Unit 2: Accessing the Command Line

Objectives: Access the command line locally and remotely; gain administrative privileges from the command line

Unit 3: Intermediate Command Line Tools

Objectives: Use hardlinks, archives and compression, and vim

Unit 4: Regular Expressions, Pipelines, and I/O Redirection

Objectives: Use regular expressions to search patterns in files and output; redirect and pipe output

Unit 5: Network Configuration and Troubleshooting

Objectives: Configure network settings; troubleshoot network issues

Discuss and demonstrate Network  bonding

Static route

Different  native tools available for trouble shooting network issues

How to change network speed and other parameters of NIC

DAY 2:

Unit 6: Managing Simple Partitions and File Systems

Objectives: Create and format simple partitions, swap partitions, and encrypted partitions

How to  add disks to Linux server (Local and Network)

Discuss about NAS , SAN and ISCSI

How to  add a new LUN to Linux server

Concepts of Multipathing-Demonstrate Multipathing  using ISCSI devices

Concepts of Udev –Explain different udev command like udevinfo . etc..

Configuring  RAW file system

Different  file systems –ext3/ext4

Unit 7: Managing Flexible Storage with the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and RAID

- Objectives: Implement LVM and LVM snapshots

a)Difference between LVM1 and LVM2

b) How to migrate to LVM2

c) Demonstrate Export and import of VG 

d) Demonstrate restoring LVM after deletion

e)Important  commands –LVS,PVS,VGS etc…

Discuss and demonstrate LVM mirroring

Discuss and demonstrate RAID configuration and Software Raid

Different  levels of RAID,

Which RAID level  and where it is suitable

Manage LVM with Multipathing

DAY 3:

Unit 8: Access Network File Sharing Services; NFS and CIFS

- Objectives: Implement NFS, CIFS, and autofs

2) Mount and umount nfs share-

3) How to forcefully umount a file system – Its requirement

4) Difference between NFS v3 and v4

5) Various options with NFS export and when & where do we use these options.

6) Autofs- Different Maps-Built-in map  “-host”

Unit 9: Managing User Accounts

- Objectives: Manage user accounts including password aging

Unit 10: Network User Accounts with LDAP

- Objectives: Connect to a central LDAP directory service

Unit 11: Controlling Access to Files

- Objectives: Manage group memberships, file permissions, and access control lists (ACL)

Unit 12: Managing SELinux - Objectives: Activate and deactivate SELinux; set file contexts; manage SELinux booleans; analyze SELinux logs

Unit 13: Installing and Managing Software

- Objectives: Manage software and query information with yum; configure client-side yum repository files

Different methods to install software in Linux

DAY 4:

Unit 14: Managing Installed Services

- Objectives: Managing services; verify connectivity to a service

DNS/DHCP/HTTP - Explain and Demonstrate how to configure these services

How to configure Apache, How to  configure and load Plugins  with  Apache, Tuning Apache for better performance.

Unit 15: Analyzing and Storing Logs

- Objectives: Managing logs with rsyslog and log rotate

1) Discuss and demonstrate how to utilize the tool “smartctl”   to check the status of disk health.

Unit 16: Managing Processes

- Objectives: Identify and terminate processes, change the priority of a process, and use cron and at to schedule processes

Explain about Load Average

Memory management concept ( Buffer, Cache)

Unit 17: Tuning and Maintaining the Kernel

- Objectives: List, load, and remove modules; use kernel arguments

a) Discuss and demonstrate different performance monitoring tools and How to utilize the o/p of those tools for tuning the performance

DAY 5:

Unit 18: System Recovery Techniques

- Objectives: Understand the boot process and resolve boot problems

 Additional Topics (overview)

Security – Different Network security tools available in Linux-Iptables,Tcp  wrapper, PAM security modules.

 Scripting/Perl/Python-Give an introduction so that resource can start to learn themself

Demonstrate Virtualization

New features in RHEL6

ITIL: Study Notes for “ISEB BH0-012 – The Foundation ITIL” Exam

Source :-  http://cosonok.blogspot.in/2012/03/

ITIL was built around Deming's plan-do-check-act cycle.

Definitions

+ Definitive media library (DML) = a secure library where definitive authorized versions of all media configuration items (CIs) are stored and protected

+ Governance = is concerned with policy and direction.

+ ITIL = Information Technology Infrastructure Library.

+ Implementation of ITIL service management requires the preparation and planning of the effective and efficient use of the four Ps = People, Process, Products, Partners

+ Service Management = a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providingvalue to customers in the form of services.

+ Service request = a request from a user for information, advice, or for a standard change.

+ SLA = Service Level Agreement: An agreement between the service provider and their customer

ITIL Service Lifecycle

1. Service Strategy

2. Service Design: Design the Processes

3. Service Transition: Plan and Prepare for Deployment

4. Service Operation: IT Operations Management

5. Continual Service Improvement

1. Service Strategy

1.1 Strategy Management for IT services

1.2 Service Portfolio Management

1.3 Financial Management of IT Services

… ensuring that the IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price (which does not necessarily mean cheapest) and calculating the cost of providing IT services so that an organisation can understand the costs of its IT services.

1.4 Demand Management

1.5 Business Relationship Management

2. Service Design

A service should always deliver value to customers.

Resources and capabilities create value for customers.

The Service Design Stage is MOST concerned with defining policies and objectives, and includes:

+ Producing quality, secure, and resilient designs for new or improved services

+ Taking service strategies and ensuring they are reflected in the service design processes and the service designs that are produced

+ Measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of service design and the supporting processes

A service design package (SDP) contains information that is passed to service transition to enable the implementation of a new service.

2.1 Design Coordination

2.2 Service Catalogue

The responsibility of service catalogue management:

+ Ensuring that information in the service catalogue is accurate

+ Ensuring that information in the service catalogue is consistent with information in the service portfolio

+ Ensuring that all operation services are recorded in the service catalogue

2.3 Service Level Management

The purpose of service level management = to ensure an agreed level of IT service is provided for all current IT services.

Service level management process is responsible for discussing reports with customers showing whether services have met their targets.

2.4 Availability Management

+ Reliability: Ability of an IT component to perform at an agreed level at described conditions.

+ Maintainability: The ability of an IT component to remain in, or be restored to an operational state.

+ Serviceability: The ability for an external supplier to maintain the availability of component or function under a third-party contract.

+ Resilience: A measure of freedom from operation failure and a method of keeping services reliable (e.g. redundancy)

+ Security: refers to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of that data.

2.5 Capacity Management

The capacity management process includes business, service, and component sub-processes. The high-level activities include:

+ Application sizing

+ Workload management

+ Demand management

+ Modelling

+ Capacity planning

+ Resource management

+ Performance management

2.6 IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM)

Involves the following basic steps:

+ prioritising the activities to be recovered by conducting a business impact analysis(BIA)

+ performing a risk assessment (risk analysis) for each of the IT services to identify the assets, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures for each service

+ evaluating the options for recovery

+ producing the contingency plan / business continuity strategy

+ testing, reviewing, and revising the plan on a regular basis

2.7 Information Security Management System

2.8 Supplier Management

Third-party contracts are the responsibility of supplier management to negotiate and agree.

3. Service Transition

Service transition stage responsibilities:

+ To ensure that a service can be managed and operated in accordance with constraints specified during design

+ To provide good-quality knowledge and information about services

+ To plan the resources required to manage a release

3.1 Transition planning and support

3.2 Change management

The RACI Matrix – Who's Responsible, Accountable, Consulted... and kept Informed

+ R(esponsible) – Who is responsible for actually doing it?

+ A(ccountable) – Who has authority to approve or disapprove it?

+ C(onsulted) – Who has needed input about the task?

+ I(nformed) – Who needs to be kept informed about the task?

The main aims of change management include:

+ Minimal disruption of services

+ Reduction in back-out activities

+ Economic use of resources involved in the change

Emergency change advisory board: group that should review changes that must be implemented faster than the normal change process

3.3 Service asset and configuration management

The configuration management system is part of the service knowledge management system.

The configuration management system (CMS) can help determine the level of impactof a problem.

The relationship in service asset and configuration management describes how theconfiguration items (CIs) work together to deliver services.

Includes the following key process areas:

+ Identification

+ Planning

+ Change Control

+ Change Management

+ Release Management

+ Maintenance

3.4 Release and deployment management

Objectives of release and deployment management: To define and agree release and deployment plans with customers and stakeholders. The goals of release management include:

+ Planning the roll-out of software

+ Designing and implementing procedures for the distribution and installation of changes to IT systems

+ Effectively communicating and managing expectations of the customer during the planning and roll-out of new releases

+ Controlling the distribution and installation of changes to IT systems

3.5 Service Validation and testing

3.6 Change evaluation

3.7 Knowledge management

4. Service Operation

Service operation stage of the service lifecycle, delivers and manages IT services atagreed levels to business users and customers. Service operations contribution to business is adding value, and the service value is visible to customers.

The following areas of service management can benefit from automation:

+ Design and modelling

+ Reporting

+ Pattern recognition and analysis

+ Detection and monitoring

List of processes:

4.1 Event management

The event management process is involved in monitoring an IT service and detecting when the performance drops below acceptable limits

4.2 Incident management

*Major incidents require separate procedures.

The objectives of incident management:

+ To restore normal service operation as quickly as possible

+ To minimize adverse impacts on business operations

4.3 Request fulfilment

4.4 Problem management

A problem = a condition often identified as a result of multiple incidents that exhibit common symptons.

Objectives of problem management:

+ Minimizing the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented

+ Preventing problems and resulting incidents from happening

+ Eliminating recurring incidents

4.5 Access management

Access management process is responsible for providing rights to use an IT service.

5. Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

Where to we want to be?

Define measurable targets (Service metrics measure: The end-to-end service.)

Improvement initiatives typically follow a seven-step process:

5.1 Identify the strategy for improvement

5.2 Define what you will measure

5.3 Gather the data

5.4 Process the data

5.5 Analyse the information and data

5.6 Present and use the information

5.7 Implement improvement

Appendix A: ITIL Function – Service Desk (function of Service Operation)

Service desk features include:

+ single point of contact (SPOC)

+ single point of entry

+ single point of exit

+ make life easier for customers

+ data integrity

+ incident control: life-cycle management of all service requests

+ communication: keeping a customer informed of progress and advising on workarounds

Types of service desk structure:

+ Local service desk: to meet local business needs

+ Central service desk: for organisations having multiple locations

+ Virtual service desk: for organisations having multi-country locations
+ Follow the Sun

Appendix B: ITIL Function - Software Asset Management (function of Service Operation)

Software asset management (SAM) practices include:

+ maintaining software license compliance

+ tracking inventory and software asset use

+ maintaining standard policies and procedures surrounding definition, deployment, configuration, use, and retirement of software assets and the DML

Google Chrome Browser Tips and Tricks

These tips will help you to get most out of the Chrome browser.

1. Pin Tab

When you pin a tab, it minimizes the tab to display only the icon. When you have several tabs opened, this feature is very helpful, as the Tab title displays only the icon and takes only little real estate.

Before pinning:

After pinning 1st two tabs:

2. Display Home Button

By default, chrome doesn’t display the ‘Home’ button in the toolbar.

Click on the ‘Wrench Icon’ on the right-hand corner of the browser to get to the “Customize” option for Chrome browser -> Preferences (or Options) -> Select the check-box for “Show home button in toolbar”

This will now display the ‘Home’ button in front of the URL field. Click this button to go to your home page quickly.
3. Omnibox

The URL address bar (also called as Omnibox in Chrome) in the Chrome browser is not only to enter your URL. Just type the keyword you want to search and press enter, which will perform a google search.

You can also perform calculations or conversions directly in the Omnibox. Try typing any one of the following in the URL address bar and press enter to see the results yourself.

7 + 200
7 * 200
1 lb in kg
2 miles in km

4. incognito – Secret Mode

Incognito mode is for private browsing, where Chrome doesn’t record your browsing history, download hisotry. Any cookies that are stored during the incognito mode is deleted when you close the browser.

You can launch incognito by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N, (or) Settings -> New incognito Window, (or) right mouse-click on a link from a regular Chrome session, and select “open link in incognito window”.

One of the practical use for this mode (apart from private browsing) is to login to the same site using two accounts.

For example, if you have two gmail accounts, login using the first account in your regular Chrome browser, and login using the second account in your Incognito mode on your Chrome browser. This way, you can be logged in to two gmail accounts at the same time on Chrome browser.

5. Reopen Recently Closed tab

If you’ve closed a tab by mistake, you can open it by pressing Ctrl + Shift + T, (or) right mouse-click on the empty area in the title-bar -> and select “Reopen closed tab” as shown below.

6. Chrome:// commands

There are various about command that you can type in the address bar.

chrome://histograms
chrome://memory
chrome://cache
chrome://dns
etc.

7. Task Manager

Task manager displays the memory and CPU usage of the Chrome browser, broken down by each and every Tab. If you have multiple Tabs open, and when your system is slow, you can use task manager to identify which Tab is causing the issue.

Right click on empty space in the title bar and select “Task manager”, (or) Press Shift + escape key to launch it as shown below.

8. Change Search Engine in the Omnibar

Type “amazon” in the address bar AND press “Tab”, which will change the address bar to “Search amazon.com:”, any keyword you type after this will be searched in the amazon.com and it will take you to amazon.com website.

You can also change the default search engine. Right click on the address bar -> and select “Edit search engine”. From here you can choose other search engines.

9. Open a link at a specific Tab Location

As you already know, when you right click on a link, and say “Open link in a new tab”, it opens it as a new tab (next to the current open tab).

However, if you want the link to be opened at a specific tab location, you can hold the link, drag it and drop it as a specific tab location. You’ll see a small arrow when you drag and drop the link. In the following example, I tried to drop the link at 2nd tab location.

10. Carry your Chrome Settings with You

If you are using multiple computers (at home, at work, etc.), you don’t need to worry about trying to setup the Chrome browser in the same way on all the computers you use. Instead, setup your bookmarks, extensions, themes, settings, etc, on your Chrome browser on one computer, and select “Sign in to Chrome” from the settings menu as shown below.

This will ask you to enter your google username and password. This will save all your chrome settings on your google account. Next time when you sign-up from another machine, all your chrome settings will be visible on the new system. If you make any changes to your chrome settings on this new system, it will be available on your other computers too. Use this feature only on the systems which you trust and not on public computers.

11. Drag and Drop Downloaded file

Once a file is downloaded, you can just drag and drop the file (from the Chrome download window) to your Windows explore, or any other file browser that you are using on your system.

12. History

Press Ctrl-H, or go to Customize -> History, to launch the history window. From here you can search for a specific website from your history, delete all your history, or delete only selected items from your history.

13. Create a Shortcut of the Current Tab

If you like to create a shortcut to the website that you are currently viewing, go to Customize -> Tools -> Create application shortcuts. This will ask you where you like to create the shortcut for this website, as shown below.

Once you create a application shortcut, next time when you click on it to open it, it will open this site in a Chrome browser without any tabs, url location bar, etc.

14. Navigate Between Tabs Quickly

• Use Ctrl+Tab to navigate Tabs one by one
• Press Ctrl-1 to go to 1st Tab
• Press Ctrl-2 to go to 2nd Tab
• ..
• Press Ctrl-9 to switch to the last Tab

15. Resize TextArea

You can also resize a textarea that you see on any website. Please note that you can resize only the textarea and not a textbox. At the bottom right corner of the textarea, you’ll see two slanted lines, use your mouse, hold this, and drag it to resize the textarea on the screen.

You can try this yourself on the comment box (which is a textarea) located at the bottom of this page.

16. Detach a tab

If you have multiple Tabs opened, and like to detach a single tab as a separate Chrome instance, just drag the tab anywhere outside the browser, which will detach the tab and run it in a separate Chrome browser window.


17. Highlight a Text and Search

When you are browsing a website, if you come across some word that you are not familiar with and like to perform a google search on it, just double-click on the text to high-light it, right mouse-click, and select “Search google for”, which will open a new Tab and search for the selected text. This saves some time.

18. Autofill

You can use the autofill option to enter one or more addresses that you can use to fill-up any web forms. You can also use this feature to store one or more credit card information that can be pre-populated on web forms. Don’t use this feature on a computer that you don’t trust.

Go to settings -> Options -> Personal Stuff -> Click on the check-box “Enable Autofill to fill out web forms in a single click” -> Click on Manager autofill settings -> Click on ‘Add new Address’ and enter the information.

19. Google Cloud Print

Go to Settings -> Options -> Under the Hood -> click on sign into “Google Cloud Print”.

Once you setup your printer using Google cloud print, you can print to it from anywhere. i.e You can print to it from your mobile, other PC at work, or any other system that is connected to the internet.

20. Google Chrome Browser Shortcuts

The following are some useful shortcuts:

• Alt+F – Open the wrench menu (i.e chrome settings menu)
• Ctrl+J – Go to downloads window
• Ctrl+H – Go to history window
• Ctrl+Tab – Navigate Tabs
• Alt+Home – Go to home page
• Ctrl+U – View source code of the current page
• Ctrl+K – To search quickly in the address bar
• Ctrl+L – Highlights the URL in the address bar (use this to copy/paste the URL quickly)
• Ctrl+N – Open a new Chrome browser window
• Ctrl+Shift+N – Open a new incognito window (for private browsing)
• Ctrl+Shift+B – Toggle bookmark display
• Ctrl+W – Close the current Tab
• Alt+Left Arrow – Go to the previous page from your history
• Alt+Right Arrow – Go to the next page from your history
• Space bar – Scroll down the current web page

Following are the 12 most helpful chrome:// commands that you should know.

1. chrome://flags

From here you can enable some of the experimental features that are hidden in the google Chrome browser. Please note that as mentioned on this page, since these are experimental, these might not work as expected and might cause issues. Enable these features and use it at your own risk.

2. chrome://dns

This displays the list of hostnames for which the browser will prefetch the DNS records.

3. chrome://downloads

This is also available from the Menu -> Downloads. Short cut key is Ctrl+J

4. chrome://extensions

This is also available from the Menu -> Tools -> Extensions

5. chrome://bookmarks

This is also available from the Menu -> Bookmarks -> Bookmark Manager. Short cut key is Ctrl+Shift+O

6. chrome://history

This is also availble from the Menu -> History. Short cut key is Ctrl+H

7. chrome://memory

This will redirect to “chrome://memory-redirect/”. This will display the memory used by Google chrome browser, and all other browsers running on the system (including firefox).

This also display all the process related to browser with their PID, process name, and the memory it takes.

8. chrome://net-internals

This displays all networking related information. Use this to capture network events generated by the browser. You can also export this data. You can view DNS host resolver cache.

One of the important feature in this feature is “Test”. If a URL failed to load, you can go to “chrome://net-internals” -> click on “Tests” tab -> type that URL which failed, and click on “Start Test”, which will do some test and report you why that URL failed.
chrome://plugins/

9. chrome://quota-internals

This gives information about the disk space quote used by the browser, including the break down of how much space the individual websites took under temporary files.

10. chrome://sessions

This displays the number of sessions and magic list that are currently running.

11. chrome://settings

This is also available from the Menu -> Options (on Windows), and Menu -> Preferences (on Linux). From here you can control various browser related settings.

12. chrome://sync-internals

This gives information about the chrome sync feature, including the Sync URL used by google, and sync statistics.

Finally, to view all the available chrome:// commands, type chrome://about/ in your chrome browser URL as shown below.

Also, please note that all of the commands mentioned above can also be called using google chrome about command, which redirects to chrome://.

For example, both of the following are exactly the same.

about:dns
chrome://dns