Linux Administration

Course Description

Linux Administration has students explore how system administrators address organisational information resource management needs through Linux-based operating systems. The curriculum encompasses installation; creating and maintaining file systems; user and group administration; backup and restore processes; network configuration; various system services; security administration; and updating and maintaining the system.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, CTS is the Computer Technology and Skills prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered summer and fall, with MAC1105 as prerequisite, giving approximately 45 contact hours at the prefix's unsuffixed convention.

Linux runs most of the internet, most cloud infrastructure, and most of what sits behind a modern application, and Linux competence is one of the more durable skills in this field — the commands and concepts have been stable for decades while a great deal else has churned. It is also the skill that most reliably opens the door to cloud, DevOps, and security work, all of which assume it.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for its CTS courses. The prefix's unsuffixed courses run at 15 contact hours per credit (CTS2214 at 3 credits and 45 hours), while its C-suffixed courses run at 20 (CTS2302C, CTS2303C, CTS2321C, CTS2358C, CTS2370C and CTS2375C all at 3 credits and 60 hours). This course is unsuffixed and is priced at the unsuffixed convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe Linux, its distributions, and their differences.
• Perform an installation and describe partitioning choices.
• Navigate the filesystem hierarchy and describe its structure.
• Use the shell effectively for everyday administration.
• Use pipes, redirection, and command composition.
• Use text processing tools to extract and transform data.
• Edit configuration files using a terminal editor.
• Create and maintain filesystems and manage mounting.
• Manage storage, including partitions and logical volumes.
• Monitor and manage disk usage.
• Create and manage users and groups.
• Configure file permissions and ownership correctly.
• Describe and apply special permissions and default permission masks.
• Configure privilege escalation and describe its safe use.
• Manage software packages and repositories.
• Update and patch a system safely.
• Manage services and describe the init system.
• Configure and troubleshoot networking.
• Configure common system services.
• Configure and verify backup and restore procedures.
• Apply security hardening measures.
• Configure the host firewall.
• Read and interpret system logs to diagnose faults.
• Automate routine tasks with shell scripting and scheduling.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe containerisation and its relationship to the host.
• Describe configuration management tooling.
• Describe SELinux or equivalent mandatory access control.
• Describe performance analysis and tuning.
• Describe high availability and clustering.
• Prepare for a Linux certification.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Linux and its distributions
• Installation and partitioning
• The filesystem hierarchy
• Effective shell use
• Pipes, redirection, and composition
• Text processing tools
• Terminal editing
• Filesystems and mounting
• Storage and logical volumes
• Disk usage management
• Users and groups
• Permissions and ownership
• Special permissions and umask
• Privilege escalation
• Package and repository management
• Updating and patching
• Service and init management
• Network configuration and troubleshooting
• System services
• Backup and restore
• Security hardening
• Host firewall
• Log interpretation
• Scripting and scheduling

Optional Topics

• Containerisation
• Configuration management tooling
• Mandatory access control
• Performance tuning
• High availability and clustering
• Linux certification

Resources & Tools

• Virtualisation software — VirtualBox is free, and VMware Workstation Player is free for personal use; a home lab of virtual machines costs nothing but disk space and it is the single best way to learn this material.
• Microsoft Learn (learn.microsoft.com) — free official documentation and learning paths for Windows Server and client administration.
• The Linux Documentation Project, and your distribution's own documentation — free; the Arch and Debian wikis are useful well beyond their own distributions.
• MDN Web Docs (developer.mozilla.org) — free and the authoritative reference for HTML and CSS.
• CompTIA (comptia.org) — A+, Network+, Security+, Linux+, and Server+; employers ask for these by name.
• Microsoft and Linux Foundation certifications — role-based credentials recognised in enterprise hiring.
• man pages and built-in help — learning to read documentation rather than searching for a copyable command is the skill that actually separates administrators.
• Your own documented home lab — a candidate who can describe what they built, what broke, and how they fixed it interviews far better than one listing courses.

Career Pathways

• Network and computer systems administrator — SOC 15-1244.
• Computer user support specialist — SOC 15-1232; the usual entry route.
• Computer network support specialist — SOC 15-1231.
• Windows systems administrator — a large share of enterprise infrastructure roles.
• Linux systems administrator — strongly represented in hosting, cloud, and engineering organisations.
• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps — the growth area, and it builds directly on this material.
• Information security analyst — SOC 15-1212; systems administration is the most common route into security.
• Web developer — SOC 15-1254, for the web foundations pathway.
• Florida's defence, space, and simulation sector, plus healthcare, hospitality, and financial services IT — ⚠ many defence roles require U.S. citizenship and some a security clearance.
• Managed service providers — broad exposure quickly, and a common early career step.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The command line is unforgiving — there is no undo and no recycle bin

• A deletion at the shell is immediate and permanent. There is no confirmation by default and nothing to restore from — which is why backups and care matter more here than on a desktop system.
• Read the command before you press return, particularly anything recursive, anything with a wildcard, and anything run with elevated privilege. A misplaced space in a recursive delete has destroyed production systems.
• Check where you are and who you are before acting — the wrong directory or the wrong host turns a routine command into an incident.
• Use elevated privilege only for the command that needs it, rather than working as the superuser continuously.
• Back up a configuration file before editing it, every time. It costs a second and it has saved every administrator repeatedly.
• Test destructive commands non-destructively first — list what would be affected before acting on it.
• ⚠ Do not paste commands you do not understand. This is how systems are destroyed and, occasionally, how they are compromised deliberately.
• Keep a shell open with working access when changing anything that could lock you out — firewall rules, authentication configuration, or network settings.

⚠ Read the logs and the documentation — that is the actual skill

• Linux tells you what is wrong if you look. The difference between someone who administers systems and someone who searches for commands to copy is almost entirely a willingness to read logs and documentation.
• Go to the logs first when something fails, and learn where your distribution puts them and how to query the journal.
• Read the error message completely, including the part after the first line.
• Use the manual pages. They are on the machine, they are authoritative, and they are frequently faster than searching — and they document your version rather than someone else's.
• Understand permissions properly. A very large share of "it does not work" on Linux is a permissions or ownership problem, and guessing at it with broad permissions creates a security hole instead of a fix.
• ⚠ Never solve a permissions problem by making something world-writable. It works, and it is a vulnerability.
• Learn scripting early. Anything done more than twice should be scripted, and automation is what distinguishes an administrator from an operator.
• Document your systems. What is installed, why, and what was changed — because you will not remember.

⚠⚠ An untested backup is not a backup

• Backups fail silently. A job that reports success can produce media that cannot restore, and organisations discover this at the worst possible moment.
• Test restores on a schedule, not the backup job's status. The only evidence a backup works is a completed restore.
• Follow 3-2-1: three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site.
• ⚠ Keep at least one copy offline or immutable. Ransomware deliberately encrypts or deletes backups it can reach, and a backup on a network share the compromised account can write to is not protection.
• Know your recovery point and recovery time objectives, and whether your arrangements actually meet them — most do not, and nobody checks until it matters.
• Back up the configuration as well as the data. Restoring files onto a server nobody knows how to rebuild is a partial recovery at best.
• Document the restore procedure so that someone else can execute it under pressure, and keep that documentation somewhere it survives the outage.
• Verify what is actually included. Backup scope drifts as systems change, and new servers are routinely missed.
• Retention is a policy decision with legal and regulatory implications, not a storage decision.

⚠⚠ Administrative privilege has a blast radius — work accordingly

• A mistake made as an administrator affects everyone, immediately and frequently irreversibly. That asymmetry is the defining feature of the role.
• ⚠ Use a separate administrative account, and use it only when required. Browsing the web or reading mail as an administrator is how a single phishing click becomes a domain compromise.
• Apply least privilege to yourself as well as to users — the account with the fewest rights that can do the job.
• Know what a command will do before you run it, especially anything recursive, anything with a wildcard, and anything with a force flag.
• Check which machine you are on. Running the right command on the wrong server is one of the commonest serious incidents in this field — make prompts and window titles unmistakable.
• Change one thing at a time, and know how to reverse it before you make it.
• Follow change control. It exists because unannounced changes cause outages nobody can diagnose, and "it was a small change" is what people say afterwards.
• Test in a non-production environment where one exists, and be honest about the difference when it does not.
• Document what you did and when. The next person troubleshooting is frequently you, months later.
• Own your mistakes immediately. An error reported at once is usually recoverable; one concealed for an hour frequently is not, and organisations forgive the first far more readily.

⚠⚠ Authorisation is the line between a systems professional and a defendant

• Never access, scan, or reconfigure a system you do not have permission to touch. Administrative knowledge is exactly what makes unauthorised access easy, and that is why the rule matters more in this field than in most.
• Federal exposure: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalises unauthorised access to a protected computer, and "exceeding authorised access" has been read broadly.
• ⚠⚠ Florida exposure is separate and additional: the Florida Computer Crimes Act, Chapter 815, Florida Statutes, makes offences against computer users and equipment punishable under state law independently of federal law.
• Having administrative credentials is not the same as having authorisation. Being able to read a mailbox or a file share does not mean you may, and audit logs record that you did.
• Use the lab. The programme provides an isolated environment precisely so techniques that would be unlawful elsewhere can be practised lawfully — and build your own virtual lab at home, off the production network.
• Get scope in writing before any authorised administrative or testing engagement.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies — computer crime and privacy law changes; verify rather than relying on a course guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live here, since Daytona State offers both associate-level and bachelor of applied science coursework in this prefix.

CTS3348 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered summer and fall at Daytona State, with MAC1105 as prerequisite.

See this repository's CTS2321C (Linux System Administration) and CET2660C (Linux Networking and Security) guides for related lower-division courses. Build a home lab — it costs nothing and it is what employers actually ask about.