NARRATIVE REPORT

UNIX System Administration

A seminar inclined to information technology was held last February 10, 2012 at the Audio Visual Room of Batangas State University, Alangilan Campus. The main agenda is to have the basic knowledge of UNIX System Administration under the training of Logica-Philippines Inc.s resource speaker, Engr. Joel S. Maranan. The speaker first had his sharing of work experiences in various companies from the past six years. Now, at his present work, he is the Operations Support at Logica wherein his job description includes System Administration. According to him, a system administrator is a person who is responsible for managing a multi-user computing environment, such as a local area network (LAN). The responsibilities of the system administrator typically includes installing and configuring system hardware and software, establishing and managing user accounts, upgrading software and backup and recovery tasks. One must have a strong IT skill in order to execute such job. He should also be a problem solver and competitive knowledge on computer security. As electronics and communications engineering students, the listeners can also practice system administration if theyre interested in dealing with system databases and the like. The speaker related that he works with ECEs and this is one of the many job opportunities open for ECE. Afterwards, he lectured on the history of UNIX. The attendees were able to learn that UNIX is a joint project between Bell Laboratories, General Telemetric, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology which began way back 1965. UNIX is an operating system which started with MULTICS (Multiplexed Operating and Computing System) as its name. One of the researchers in Bell Laboratories, Ken Thompson, started writing programs that simulated the behavior of the MULTICS file system. In 1969, he wrote the first version of UNIX, The original spelling was UNICS (UNiplexed Information and Computing Service), which Ritchie later described as a somewhat treacherous pun on Multics.

As for the UNIX Environment, he described the UNIX shells. The shell is primarily a command interpreter. The shell accepts commands a user enters, interprets these commands, and then passes them to the kernel for execution. Kernel, on the other hand, is the core of the UNIX operating system. The kernel in OS level directly manages all the physical resources of the computer, including: file systems and structures; device; management, such as storing data to the hard disk; process management or CPU functions and memory management. He also stressed that in UNIX, the GUI is separated from the operating system itself. This OS is far different from Windows or MacOS9 which don't run without the GUI. The GUI on UNIX is a separate layer that sits on top of the core operating system. In principle, one can uninstall the GUI and still have a completely functional UNIX system sans any graphical programs. Later on, he gave key points why UNIX is best chosen by large companies around the world: 1. UNIX systems are not considered vulnerable to existing virus and spy-ware threats. These factors mean less resources expended on preventive measures and thus, total maintenance; 2. A key indicator of stability is the "uptime" of computers how long they typically run before a reboot is required and this is an advantage for UNIX users; 3. UNIX has a high standard for source code quality. For example, SOLARIS systems are very stable especially on its own SPARC architecture; they have a very low failure rate and system maintenance time; 4. Some UNIX OS has several purchase options ranging from free to retail-priced packages. All of these are considerably less expensive than other proprietary OS and; 5. It is built for network computing. As part of the first and most successful Web server system in history, for example, the latest Solaris systems are built on the company's experience with early Web sites and network demands. The attendees learned that UNIX is administered thru the command line interface (CLI) but it can also be accessed thru its separate GUI. To promote a healthy learning environment, Engr. Joel allowed us to do hands-on activities. He commanded us what to type in the CLI for us to experience the programming processes happening in UNIX.

Yours truly learned how to manually mount a virtual hard disk in the UNIX system. Its quite difficult at first, but everything went smoothly as long as he tells you the inputs you need to know.