Philosophy of the course

This course is highly practical and its goal is not to teach particular technology. Linux Administration (and generally system administration) is a broad world where the essential ability is to learn new things on the fly, understand what you just learnt and validate if it fits into your computer science knowledge. Learn how to blindly configure one particular piece of software is completely useless, because after you graduate it will be probably obsolete or completely changed.

The whole philosophy of the course comes from the fact that we want to teach you how to learn new stuff in the systems related fields. Hence our tasks description are very short like in the real world. Most of your work will be to study the topic in your group with help of video-calls, to think about it thoroughly and then to do the practical work. It is expected to spend at least 2 hours (labs time) per week brain storming in the group. However it is completely up to you.

Huge advantage is that there are tons of materials on the Internet, hence you can learn anything in a step-by-step manner without any previous knowledge. However don’t forget to understand all the steps you reproduce. Think why something is not working as you expected and try to always validate that things work. Do not blindly believe that it is working; what is not tested is not working. It is better to understand half of things and have half of the task done than understand nothing and have task completed perfectly.

Finally when you finish the course you will have the ability to solve most of the systems tasks on your own and you will understand how the modern systems work from the excellent administrator point of view. This year the whole learning experience is affected by distant learning because there is usually very intense interaction on both lectures and labs. We will try to simulate this with group-oriented teaching. As always, contact us if you have any troubles, lack of understanding or other questions.