Free Teaching Material on Systems and Network Management

Purpose of this site

I wrote these notes to teach the subject Systems and Network Management in the Department of Information and Communications Technology at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Tsing Yi), up to September 2004.

This site has no connection to HKIVE or to the Department of ICT, since I do not work there any more.

I am happy to make this teaching material available under the GPL license; please contact me if you would like me to add the license to specific files that interest you.

Teaching Plan

Teaching plan: PDF, OpenOffice format, Excel format

Assignments

Submit zipfile or tarball of text sourcode and two LDIF files online, outside campus, inside campus (using SSL). Here is our CA certificate to load into your browser.

Assignment 3: `Net::LDAP` with solutions

Due: 8pm, Sunday, 23 May 2004.
The assignment is here .
A solution, another (incomplete, since no LDIF) solution, another (very complete) solution. The last one was written first, and it is not as clean as I would like. I may rewrite parts of it for production use to make it shorter and simpler, and make the code cleaner and more easy to follow. The first one listed here is the last one I wrote, and has the cleanest code. Note that the first two show how to use and create nested data structures, and how to pass references to hashes to and from functions.
Some other Perl programs I have written that may or may not interest you:
- A solution to the exercise given in the laboratories (which many of you did not bother to do!): make-ou
- The program I wrote to create all the accounts and set up the server ldap1.tyict.vtc.du.hk: setup-ldap1
- A program I wrote to setup the ACLs to allow you to write to your own organisational unit: gen-acls
- A very simple little program to create the admin user for which special access is provided by the ACLs above: create-admin
- A program I wrote to send you all email: mail-people
- The program I wrote to generate the fake enrollment data: generate-fake-enrolment-data
- A little Perl module I wrote to calculate and verify the checkdigit in a Hong Kong ID: HKID.pm. Thank you, Keung Kai-chung, for the email that got me started.
- A little Perl module I wrote to randomly select an item from a list, where each item in the list has its own "weight", so that we can, for example, select the gender "male" with greater probability than "female" for to simulate the gender of students in an engineering course. It is used by the program above.
The data files are here. Choose the one with your student number in the file name.
A few little programs that may help
Getting Started with the Assignment, Solutions are above.
Functions to Search for next UID, GID numbers. Please do not use getpwent() or getgrent(); I am sorry I made the mistake of suggesting that you use them!
A picture showing the structure of the directory on ldap1.tyict.vtc.edu.hk

Older Assignments

Due at your next laboratory session.
Submit your solutions to all questions in the Perl Data Structures Tutorial, Solutions, some text files you can browse and run: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
Assignment 2: Questions
The second deadline has been extended to 8pm, Monday, 8 December 2003 since ictlab was down on Sunday 7 December 2003.
The student data is here: Artificial student data for the assignment
Discussion about the assignment. Please discuss the assignment here rather than sending me email.
Due 8pm, Sunday 30 November 2003 — get a 10% bonus
Otherwise, submit before 8pm Monday 8 December 2003.
Submit zipfile of text sourcode online, Our CA certificate to load into your browser.
Note that I made two mistakes in my assignment specification:
- You do NOT need to submit any hard copy
- You do NOT need to submit any screen dumps of the User Manager For Windows, but instead, you DO need to show the ACLs for all the home directories you have created. You could do that like this:
```
D:\home> for /d %i in (*) do @cacls %i >> \temp\cacls-out.log
```
  and submit the output file that this creates.
How I would run my assignment on Linux in the College:
- Create a local account for myself, and copy my work to that account:
```
$ sudo useradd -c "Nick Urbanik (local)" nickl
$ sudo passwd nickl
Changing password for user nicku.
New UNIX password:
$ sudo cp -a assignment-2 ~nickl
$ sudo chown -R nickl.nickl ~nickl
```
- Add the new local account to the sudoers file:
```
$ sudo visudo
```
- Log in to my new local account, and temporarily turn off LDAP authentication:
```
$ sudo authconfig
```
- To make things a bit easier, I would add /sbin and /usr/sbin to my PATH environment variable which is set in my log in script, ~/.bash_profile:
```
$ echo 'PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin' >> ~/.bash_profile
```
  - Please understand what that does; please don't destroy your log in script
- Then source it:
```
$ source ~/.bash_profile
```
- Note: to see what is happening in that last part, please see section 7.2, page 187, of my Workshop Notes.

Assignments 2002–2003

Assignment 1: Perl Hashes and Arrays: Questions Solutions.
Assignment 2: Questions, Suggestions towards a solution.
Assignment 3: Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting Assignment: The assignment specification.

Test on SNMP on Tuesday, 20 January, 2004, 10.30am, B115

Sorry about the confusion of posting both the wrong time and location—the test will be held in the normal lecture time, as shown above. I have also corrected the time in the Study Guide, and have posted the correct time and location in the email I sent out this morning.
Study Guide
Please bring your Perl Reference Guide booklets, the small booklets I gave you at the beginning of the year, as you will need them during the test.
Yellow paper: Questions, Solutions; White paper: Questions, Solutions

Lectures

Network Design

LDAP

Notes about LDAP: single page PDF, PDF handout for printing
Perl LDAP programming with Net::LDAP: PDF, 1 Slide/page, PDF, 4 Slides/page
External Resources:
- An Excellent tutorial on many aspects of LDAP: straight to the point, and with examples.

DHCP

Lecture notes: (single page PDF), (4up PDF).
The DHCP and DNS System used in CM two years ago, and in the Computer Centre in Tsing Yi for the last two or three years, and now has been reorganised for ICT last week
The manual page for my Perl program: make-dhcpd.conf(1)
Some manual pages for the current version of the ISC DHCP server:
Some RFCs relating to DHCP.

Routing and Switching

Routing and Route Summarisation notes: (PDF, 1 slide/page), (PDF, 4 slides/page)

Useful 3Com reference

Everything you wanted to know about IP addresses but were afraid to ask, (local copy)

Revision June 2003

Subject Summary: (4up PDF), (single page PDF)

Workshop Exercises

Perl Exercises

An Introduction to Perl, Solutions.
Perl Data Structures: tutorial, Solutions, some text files you can browse and run: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.
Making Accounts with Perl and Regular Expressions
- The (artificially generated) student registration data. You will use this for the remaining exercises. Note that this file is generated using the original data format, but all the names, numbers and IDs are randomly generated.
- How do I set up a Perl program so I can execute it just by typing it's name?
  - First, make a directory ~/bin if it does not exist already
  - Put your program (say, printit) into that directory
  - Make it executable:
```
chmod +x printit
```
  - That's it!
- useradd will not make a user name that begins with anything but a letter. The code from chkname.c in the shadow-utils says:
  - User/group names must start with a letter, and may not contain colons, commas, newlines (used in passwd/group files...) or any non-printable characters.
  - There is a length limit of 32 on user names, and a limit of 16 characters on group names.
  So put a letter in front of the student number.
- The hash_md5_password function that I wrote to MD5 hash passwords for use with a call to useradd.
- See here for how to install Linux onto your removable hard disk using the automatic Kickstart installation disks.
- Setting up local (non-LDAP) accounts
- New notes from the OSSI subject about applying OS updates. A yum configuration file that will speed up yum enormously by installing updates form local repository. Save this to /tmp and then copy to overwrite the file /etc/yum.conf, e.g., after saving to /tmp with Shift-click, then:
```
$ sudo cp /tmp/yum.conf-rh9 /etc/yum.conf
```
- Some notes about updating Mozilla and setting up Java, Acrobat Reader, and Flash 6.
Lab activity: Making Windows 2000 accounts using Perl.

SNMP Exercises

An Introduction to SNMP: the MIB tree.
SNMP Operations: get.
SNMP Agent: set and trap operations A patch to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf that provides simple public, private community strings using snmp v3 VACM.
The VACM, USM Tutorial, Solutions Monday, 23 December 2003. Interfaces Tree A4, just in bounding box: Interfaces Tree; Attempt to show all of the MIB tree (way too wide): Big part of MIB Tree A3, just in bounding box: Big part of MIB Tree
Perl Net::SNMP, and more on USM and VACM, Solutions, 29 May 2004 snmpget-loopback-bytes, snmpget-loopback-bytes-usm, The SNMP RFCs
Setting up Cricket to monitor SNMP objects
Exercises with Cricket

Network Troubleshooting Exercises

Exercises with troubleshooting tools
DHCP and tcpdump, the source file print-bootp.c from tcpdump version 3.7.1, from which I wrote the handout.

LDAP Exercises

Intro to LDAP Operations
Exercises with LDAP and LDAP filters, solutions. RFC 2254; the grammar used there is defined in RFC 822. LDAP version 3 is defined in RFC 2251.
Exercises with Net::LDAP, Solutions: change-description.pl, show-password.pl
An exercise with your own LDAP directory Little shell environment setting file The patch to the migration tools.

Routing Exercises

Exercises in subnet aggregation, Solutions

Past Exam Papers

Very Important Note

The exam this year (on 31 May 2004) will be quite different from previous years. It will involve much more Perl programming than before. In particular, it will include qestions related to programming with Net::SNMP and Net::LDAP. Information about these modules will be provided in the exam room.

Other changes include BGP added for the first time, some other material on DHCP and DNS removed. We emphasised SNMPv3 much more than previously, and did not perform laboratory exercises with Cricket.

Supplementary exam for 2003/2004 Question Paper, Suggested answers
Exam for 2003/2004 Question Paper, Suggested answers
Exam for 2002/2003 Question Paper, Suggested answers
Supplementary Exam for 2002/2003 Question Paper, Suggested answers
Exam for 2001/2002 Question Paper, Suggested answers
Supplementary exam for 2001/2002 Question Paper, Suggested answers

Older Material from 2001/2002

Switching notes: (PowerPoint)
Creating User Accounts in Linux using regular expressions. And here are solutions.
Tutorial Exercise about the Structure of Management Information. RFC1213-MIB.txt
The lab test, to be held on Tuesday, 5 February Please refer to the cricket notes above.
The first Cisco Router familiarisation exercise, in a different laboratory, C218.

Revision from 2001/2002

Books, References and Software

Good books about Perl

Good books about SNMP

SNMP Software

OpenNMS On nms
Net SNMP
Cricket Cricket on nms, Cricket Slideshow,
MRTG
Mon,
Ntop,
Nagios (formerly Netsaint)

Other SNMP Resources

The network management server at http://netman.cit.buffalo.edu/
The Simple Web at http://www.simpleweb.org/
SNMP Link at http://www.snmplink.org/
The Simple Times is an online magazine at http://www.simple-times.org/ that produces a new issue every now and then.
Links to the SNMP FAQs

Books about Network Troubleshooting

Joseph D. Sloan, Network Troubleshooting Tools, O'Reilly, August 2001, ISBN 0-596-00186-X
The excellent mtr program, left out of Sloan's book.

Books about LDAP

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition) Timothy A. Howes, Mark C. Smith, Gordon S. Good ISBN: 0672323168, Addison Wesley Professional, May 2, 2003 (now in the library, call number: TK 5105.595 .H69 2003)
LDAP System Administration, Gerald Carter 1-565-92491-6
Clayton Donley, LDAP Programming, Management and Integration, Manning, 2003, ISBN: 1-930110-40-5

Burning CDs: how to do it

Burning Red Hat CDs with our CD Writer in A204e You still don't have a set of three Fedora Core CDs? Here are detailed instructions on how to use our CD writer in A204e to burn any of the six CDROMs. This also shows how to use the very useful rsync Internet protocol.

Using Mailing Lists (or even asking me questions!)

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (Eric Raymond)

You will also find this material on the Internet at http://sysadmin.no-ip.com/snm/ (and maybe at http://nicku.thebbs.org/snm/), on the Internet and within the College at http://ictlab.tyict.vtc.edu.hk/snm/ and also at http://CSAlinux.tyict.vtc.edu.hk/snm/.

Copyright 2004 Nick Urbanik: all material on this site is available under the terms of the The GNU General Public License Where is the source? All directories below this one are browsable; all source documents and diagrams are there.

Nick Urbanik <nicku@nicku.org>