Environment Introduction Welcome! The best way to learn for most IT people is to actually do it, so that s the goal of this selfpaced lab workbook. The skills outlined here will begin to prepare you for the Linux+ / LPIC-1 certification exams and may also be useful toward some of the RHCSA objectives as well. Goals: To reinforce class skills and concepts. To learn to find help on the Internet as well as from within Linux To show yourself that you re ready to work with Linux on a daily basis. Expectations and Advice: This lab does not provide step by step instructions. Rather the goal is for you to learn the procedures and to be able to implement them in a real world environment. In other words, your boss won t tell you step by step what to do, so neither will I! This is a way of reinforcing your learning and proving to yourself that you can do it on your own. This is likely to be a very long lab. It should take a great deal of time and research to complete it, so plan accordingly. It is assumed that you will have to look up procedures online, in the man pages, in the courseware, etc. Optional Resources: Vendor web sites Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, etc all have forums and documentation. Learn to use these Online tutorials use Google to find these Adapt exercises from the courseware to the labs. Also add real configurations that you are required to do at work. Some study guides will also have excellent hands-on procedures. Part 1 Building your Linux lab environment There are several options: Real lab with real computers One or two actual computers you will be overwriting the hard drives on these computers, so be absolutely certain there is no important information remaining on these computers! You will need Internet access on these computers.
Raspberry Pi this is an interesting option. The computer itself is $35 and runs multiple Linux distributions. This may not be a great beginner option, but for those with a little more experience it should be really fun. You might look at a book entitled: Learn Raspberry Pi with Linux by Membrey and Hows (ISBN: 1430248211) Virtual machine lab This is the recommended option, as it gives you a great deal more flexibility. You will use the main computer to host Linux-based virtual machines. 1 actual computer 2GHz processor, 4 GB of RAM or more, 100 GB of hard drive space or more), Internet connectivity. Desktop or laptop. Host operating system there are virtualization options for all platforms. Here are a few suggestions: Linux CentOS and Ubuntu both use KVM as their default virtualization technology. This solution is free and typically built in with the various Linux distributions. You can also look to Virtual Box MacOSX Fusion and Parallels are both options, though they are not free. Virtual Box is free for Mac OS and a good option Windows HyperV (included with Windows Server 2008 / 2012 or some Windows 8 editions) or Virtual Box. You can also look to the various VMware options, some of which are free. Guest Operating Systems you should experiment with several Linux distributions, though CentOS is probably the best to use for actual exam preparation. Try Ubuntu, Fedora, LinuxMint and CentOS for sure, however. Note the differences between the distributions. Read about their suggested uses (business or home). Some of these also have a server version as well as a client version. Part 2 Building your virtual machines You ll need to follow the available documentation for whatever virtualization software you chose. There are lots of good resources online so don t forget to check those out. The short version is that you ll need to download an.iso image of the distribution you want. Avoid the Live versions as those are used in a different manner. After you have your distributions, the virtualization software will open a virtual machine configuration procedure that will allow you to allocate RAM and hard drive space, as well as control network connectivity. It will then provide you with access to the.iso image to begin the installation procedure. Part 3 Configurations based on some of the Linux+ / LPIC-1 objectives The following list represents a series of activities that will help you practice some of the skills covered in the Linux+ / LPIC-1 course. You should definitely add tasks, both from the book and from the objectives list, to make sure you are fully prepared. These are merely suggestions. Notice that I m not providing step by step instructions. I want you to learn the procedure yourself. 1. Install at least three different distributions
a. Practice partitioning during the installation, including the creation of separate boot, var, home and swap partitions, including a partition for the file system root. b. Choose whatever GUI s are available to your chosen distributions c. Once installation is complete, explore the built in help features to find the following: i. Use man pages to research the fstab file ii. What are the differences between the various man page sections? Admins primarily use sections 1, 5 and 8 why? iii. How can you do a keyword search within man pages? iv. At the command line, what can be found at /usr/share/doc? v. Explore whatever GUI help files might be available to you. vi. What does the following search accomplish in Google? Gnome site:ubuntu.org vii. Find at least three local sources of Linux information are there any MeetUp groups for Linux in your area? Any Linux User Groups? College clubs? d. Use the vim tutorial to get comfortable with vim. Be certain you can create, open, edit, save and close configuration files before proceeding any further! 2. Create a user account for yourself, using the default settings. a. From this point forward, get in the habit of logging on with this non-privileged user account and then using the Switch User command to get root whenever you need administrative privileges. This is an important best practice in Linux administration 3. Managing users a. Use the /etc/skel directory to pre-create some documentation and some profile settings before creating any user accounts. See Lesson 2 of the courseware b. Set password and account expirations via the /etc/login.defs file before creating any user accounts. c. Use the command line to create 5 user accounts to use later to experiment with permissions and ownership. Give each user a unique name but set them all with the same password (for your own sanity) d. Use the command line to create 5 groups based on fictitious departments: sales, marketing, human resources, IT, engineering. Place one user from above into each department. 4. File Management a. Create directories for each department (sales, marketing, human resources, IT, engineering). b. Configure permissions and ownership such that each group only has access to its own departmental directories. c. Set up hard links and symlinks between users and a test file in their department directory. See Lesson 4 i. What happens to these links if you delete the test file in the department directory? ii. What s the difference between the two types of links? d. Use the locate command and the find command to search for the test files in the department directories. Do this task first as the root user, then as a user who is a member of the group that owns the directory then as a user who is not a member of the group that owns the directory.
i. Don t forget to build the locate database (or index ) before attempting the locate command. See Lesson 4. e. At the command line only, practice mounting and unmounting.iso images. f. Mount an.iso image for one of the distributions that has a directory full of RPMs. Copy the RPMs to a directory on the Linux installation you re working with so that the RPMs are available to you any time, without having to mount the image. g. Use rpm to inventory all installed software. Redirect this inventory list into a text file. See Lesson 7 and Lesson 9 h. Install an RPM i. Find and download software that must be compiled. Go through the process of compiling the software. Check the SourceForge site for software options. j. Download a piece of software that includes an MD5 checksum to verify its integrity. After the download, compare your MD5 results with the result on the website. See Lesson 14 on Cryptographic Hashes for more info 5. Hardware Management a. Use the various commands in Lesson 12, 15 and 16 to document the hardware for your Linux installation. b. Use at least these commands: df, du, cpuinfo, devices, partitions, interrupts, ifconfig, ip addr, cat /etc/fstab, cat /etc/inittab, uname a, chkconfig. i. Direct the output from these commands into text files (make as many text files as you wish to reasonably organize this documentation) c. Review the dmesg contents. What exactly does this file tell you? 6. Scripting a. Search the Internet for at least three simple scripts that seem useful to you. b. Visit linuxconfig.org and work through at least three of the tutorials. One of these tutorials is a backup script using tar c. Use a backup script to backup the content of the department directories you created earlier. d. Schedule your backup script to run hourly. Unconfigure this as soon as you know it works! e. What is the purpose of using a dot slash in front of a script?./ f. What is the purpose of using sh-bang in front of a script? #!/bin/bash 7. System and Network Services a. If you have two Linux distributions available, and they can be networked (this is possible with virtualization), configure one as a DHCP server with a static IP address and the other as a DHCP client i. Use ping to verify connectivity between the two b. Install and enable Apache web server (the process for Apache is called httpd). You will need to find documentation for this procedure c. Configure Apache to start up automatically in runlevels 3 and 5 d. Make a test web site available for Apache and test it e. Install and configure an FTP solution. You will need to find documentation for this procedure
f. Configure your ftp service to start up automatically in runlevels 3 and 5 Make a test FTP site available and test it g. View the syslog log files for the above services h. Consider implementing the big email server Procedure Reference in Lesson 13 of the courseware 8. Security a. Use Single-User Mode to reset the root user s password. Time yourself how long did it take to exploit this configuration? b. Configure a GRUB password to protect the computer when attempting to enter Single- User Mode. Test your configuration to make sure the root user s password is protected. i. You may need to use online documentation during this procedure. c. Utilize the sudoers file to allow one regular user account the ability to shutdown the server. What other privileges could you allocate to users using sudo? 9. GUI a. Explore the various GUI s that are available. These will vary depending on what distributions you re using and what installation options you chose. Find features within the various GUI s that would be familiar or useful at work as well as at home. b. Consider how you use your personal computer. Are there Open Source applications that would run on Linux that would be useful? For example, musicians often use recording software what software is available in Linux for that purpose? Or how about gaming? Digital photography and image editing?