Unix System Administration Independent Learning

What is USAIL?

The USAIL project is both an independent study course for prospective system administrators and a reference resource. As more universities and other institutions take advantage of the World Wide Web as an educational medium, more information on system administration becomes available online. We hope that USAIL can serve as a central location for accessing that information.

The USAIL project is an infrastructure developed to provide access to a large number of external (to the USAIL archive) Unix information resources on the internet. Only some of the documents listed were written by the Unix Workstation Support Group (UWSG) at Indiana University.

What USAIL is Not

The expanded table of contents shows a list of all the documents available. The "Library Lists" sections contains a series of online libraries on specific topics and is intended to serve as quick reference for looking up information. The navigation buttons on EdCert pages look exactly like the USAIL navigation buttons except the EdCert buttons are blue. Many other documents listed here contain navigation buttons that have nothing to with USAIL.

Note:all the material found here is freely available for educational purposes. However, there are restrictions that apply if you wish to modify, republish, redistribute, or make copies of this work.

If you're interested in learning more about this project and how it came to be see, A New Twist on Teaching System Administration. This paper was written for the 1996 USENIX LISA X Conference.

This is very much a work in progress. If there is a document you would like to see linked here or a topic you'd like to see added to the library lists please let us know.

Table of Contents

An archive of all this information is available for downloading.

• Introduction (Please, oh please, read this first!)
• Expanded table of contents
• Local References
• Library Lists
• For First Timers
• Unix Review
• Understanding Unix Concepts
• Installing the Operating System
• Unix Workstation Administration Tasks
• Integrating Your Machine With the Network
• Configuring and Administrating Mail
• Administrating Peripherals
• Backups
• Automating Tasks
• Administrating Software
• Monitoring Performance
• USAIL Self-Evaluation Quiz