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OPS345 Assignment 1
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Welcome to OPS345 - Open System Application Server

What This Course is About

This course teaches the maintenance and administration of Linux servers running in the cloud. Students will learn to install configure, customize, test and maintain virtual machines in the cloud as well as common services available on Linux servers. This course is the third in a series of courses covering Linux technologies:

ULI101 taught you to be a Linux user.
OPS245 taught you to move from being a Linux user to being a Linux system administrator.
OPS335 will teach you to administer Linux servers (web servers, email servers, firewalls), as well as use cloud-provided services for DNS, databases, and file storage systems.

As a system administrator, you will be responsible for installing, configuring, adjusting, maintaining, and troubleshooting the operation of Linux network services. You will potentially have several hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of people depending on the machines that you manage. This is a lot of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes power. You will be able to change anything on the system, and you will also have the ability to damage or destroy the system.

Depending on how the course is delivered in your semester: you will need either a workstation computer powerful enough to run Linux Mint (either natively or as a VMWare Workstation virtual machine), or a USB SSD drive to store your virtual machine which you will run on a lab computer at Seneca.

Unlike OPS245: you will not be running all of your servers on your own computer. Most of them will be running on the cloud (on Amazon's servers). You will have a set amount of AWS credits provided to you for free so you can complete the corse work without paying for compute.

Learning by Doing

Most of the learning in this course occurs through the hands-on problem solving that takes place in the labs and assignments. Therefore, it's very important to stay up-to-date with the coursework, and to practice until you have confidently mastered each task.

All of the software used in this course is open source software, so you are free to use, modify, and redistribute it. This means that you can install it as many times as you want on as many different computers as you would like. It also means that you can tinker with it -- you can take it apart, see how it works, and put it back together in the same or a different way, limited only by your time and ambition. You are encouraged to experiment and question liberally.