What is Systems Administration?

Before we can get into gritty of what systems administration is, we need to talk about what these
systems are. Organizations don’t just run on their own, employees need computers along with access to
the internet to react out to clients. The organization websites needs to be up and running. Files have to
be shared back and forth and so much more. All of these requirements make up the IT infrastructure of
an organization. IT infrastructure encompasses the software, the hardware, network and services
required for an organization to operate in an enterprise IT environment. Without an IT infrastructure,
employees wouldn’t be able to do their jobs and the whole company will crumble before it even gets
started. So organizations employ the help of someone like a systems administrator to manage the
company’s IT infrastructure. System administrators or as we like to call them sysadmins, are the unsung
heroes in organization. They work in the background to make sure a company’s IT infrastructure is
always working, constantly fighting to prevent IT disasters from happening. Notice all of the really hard
work that sysadmins put in. so show a little appreciation for your sysadmin by celebrating System
Administrator Appreciation Day worldwide. Yes that’s real thing. In all seriousness, sysadmins have a lot
of different responsibilities. Any company that has a IT presence needs a sysadmins or someone who
handles those responsibilities. Any company that has an IT presence needs a sysadmin or someone who
handles those responsibilities. The role of sysadmin can vary depending on the size of an organization.
As an organization gets bigger, you need teams of sysadmins, their responsibilities may be separated out
into different roles with job titles like network administrators and database administrators. Companies
like Facebook and Apple, don’t have a single person running the IT show. But in smaller companies its
usually a single person who manage an organization of les than 100 people as a sole IT person. As you
start to scale up to large organizations, you also need to level up your knowledge of systems
administration. You need to pick up skills that allow you to automate workflows and manage
configurations or computer settings automatically. Right now, let’s focus on systems administration in a
small organization. In the next couple of lessons, we are going to talk in detail about the responsibilities
of sysadmin and how that relates to the role of IT support specialist who handle system administration.

Servers Revisited
Basically, a sysadmin is responsible for their company’s I.T. services. Employees need these I.T. services
so that they can be productive. This includes things like email, file storage, running a website and more.
The services have to be stored somewhere, they don’t just appear out of nowhere. Any thoughts on
where they are stored? If your answered servers, you are correct. We talked about servers in an earlier
course and you have learned that the term serves can multiple meaning. In once course we discussed
how servers have web content that they serve to other computers. In another course, we talked about
how serves can be software that perform a certain function. In this video, we are going to talk about
serves more in-depth because, in many cases sysadmins are responsible for maintaining all of the
company’s servers. If you are working as an I.T support specialist and have systems administration
responsibilities, these talks could be something you will perform. A server is essentially software or a
machine that provides services to other software or machines. For example, a web server stores and
servs content to clients through the internet. You can access the webserver through a domain name like
[Link]. we will dive deeper into webserver in a later course. Right now, let’s run down some other
examples of servers. An email server, provides email service to other machine and an SSH server
provides SSH services to other machines and so on and so forth. We call them machines that use the
services provided by a server, clients. Clients request the services from a server and in turn, the server
respond with the services. A server can provide services to multiple clients at once and the client can use
multiple servers. Any computer can be a server. I can startup a web server on my own home computer
that would be able to serve my own personal website on the internet for me. But, I don’t really want to
do that because I have to leave my computer on all the time in order for my website to be available all
the time. Industry standard servers are typically running 24/7 and they don’t run dinky little hardware
like my home laptop. They run on a really powerful and reliable hardware. Server hardware can come in
lots of different forms. They can be towers that sit upright, they look very similar to the desktops we
have seen. Those towers can be put in a closet or can sit on the table if your want them to. But, what if
you needed to have 10 servers? The towers would start takin up way too much space. Instead, you can
use rack servers, which lay flat and are usually mounted in a 19 inch wide server rack. If you needed
even more space, you could use blade servers that are even slimmer than racks. There are other types of
form factors for servers but these are the most common ones. You can also customize the hardware on
your serves depending on the services. For example, on a file server you’ll want more storage resources
so that you can store more files. What about connecting to our servers? Working in a small IT
organization, you could potentially deal with a handful of servers. You don’t want to have a monitor,
keyboard and a mouse for each of these servers, do you? Fortunately, you don’t have to thanks to
something we learned in an earlier course. We can remotely connect to them with something like SSH.
Even so, you should always have a monitor keyboard on hand. Sometimes when you’re working your
network might be having issues and SSH wont be an option. A common industry practice is to use
something known as a KVM switch. KVM stands for Keyboard, video and mouse. A KVM Switch looks like
a hub that you can connect multiple computers to and control them using one keyboard, mouse and
monitor. You can read more about using KVMs in the next supplemental reading. Now though we’ve got
better understanding of servers and what they do, you go out and start buying server hardware and
setting up services for your organization. Or maybe not. You don’t actually have to buy your own server
hardware or even maintain your own services. In the next video, were going to learn about a wave of
computing that started to overtake the IT world, cloud computing. See you there.

Supplemental Reading on KVM switch

Heads up: A big part of being successful in an IT role is the ability to be a self-led learner – some who
finds key resources and reads up on the latest tech trends and solutions. The supplemental readings we
have provided have been designed to slow you just some of the support materials available to you
online; they are not meant to be considered a comprehensive list. Feel free to add to the conversation
by posting other useful resources for learners to the course forums.

The Cloud
Oh, the Cloud, the magical wonderful Cloud that you hear about in the news that moves data across the
white fluffy windows in the sky. The magical Cloud dispersed bits of data across the world in itty bitty
raindrops, right? No, that’s not how the Cloud works at all, but you would be surprised how many
people believed that. There’s no doubt you have heard the term Cloud in the news or from other
people. Your photos are stored in the Cloud, your email is stored in the Cloud. Cloud computing is the
concept that you can access your data, use applications, store files, et cetera, from anywhere in the
world as long as you have an internet connection. But the Cloud is not a magical thing. It is just a
network of servers that store and process our data. You might have heard the word data center before.
A data center is a facility that stores hundreds, if not thousands of serves. Companies with large
amounts of data have to keep their information stored in places like data centers. Large companies like
google and facebook usually own their own data centers because they have billions of users that need
access to their data at all times. Smaller companies could do this, but usually rent out part of a data
center for their needs. When you use the Cloud service, this data is typically stored in the data center or
multiple data centers, anywhere that’s large enough to hold the information of millions, maybe even
billions of users. It’s easy to see why the Cloud has become a popular way of computing in the last few
years. Now instead of holding onto terabytes of storage space on your laptop, you can upload that data
to a file storage service like Dropbox, which stores that data in a managed location like a data center.
The same goes for your organization. Instead of managing your own servers, you can use internet
services that handle everything for you including security updates, server hardware routine software
updates, and more. But with each of these options come a few drawbacks. The first is cost. When you
buy a server, you pay upfront for the hardware. That way, you can set up your services like a file storage
at potentially very little cost because you are the one managing it. When you use internet services like
Dropbox, that offer file storage online, the starting cost may be smaller. But in the long term, cost could
add up since you are paying a fixed amount every month. When comparing the cost of services, always
keep in mind what a subscription could cost you for every user in your organization. Weigh the against
maintaining your own hardware in the long term and then make a decision that works best for your
organization. The second drawback is dependency. Your data is beholden to these platforms. If there’s
an issue with the service, someone other than you is responsible for getting it up and running again.
That could cost your company precious loss of productivity and data. No matter what method you
chose, remember that you are still responsible for the problems that arise when there’s an issue. If
Dropbox is having an issue with your important user data, it’s still your problem and you have to get it
working again no matter what. To prevent a situation like that from popping up, you might consider
backing up some critical data in the cloud and on physical disk. That way, if one system goes down, you
have another way to solve the problem. Whether you choose to maintain physical service or use Cloud
services, these are the type of things you need to think about when providing services to your company.
In the next couple of lessons, we are going to talk about some of the other responsibilities of the system
admin. We will give you a high level overview of these, then dive even deeper later in this course.

Organizational Policies
In a small company, it’s usually a sys admin’s responsibility to decide what computer policies to use, in
larger companies with hundreds of employees or more, this responsibility usually falls under the chief
security officer. But in smaller businesses or shops, as the IT lingo goes, the sys admin has to think
carefully about computer security and weather or not to allow access to certain users. There are few
common policy questions that come up in most IT settings that you should know. Should users be
allowed to install software? Probably not. You could run the risk of having a user or accidentally install
software which we will learn about in the upcoming course in security. Should users have complex
passwords with certain requirements? It’s definitely a good rule of thumb to create a complex password
that has symbols, random numbers, and letters. A good guidelines for a password blend is to make sure
it has a minimum of 8 characters, that make it more difficult for someone to crack. Should you be able to
view non-work related websites like Facebook? That’s a personal call. Some organizations prefer that
their employees only use their work computer and network strictly for business purposes, but many
allow other uses, so their employees can promote their business or goods on social media platforms,
stay up to date on current events, and so on, it will definitely be a policy that you and your
organization’s leaders can work out together. If you hand out a company phone to an employee, should
you set a device password? Absolutely, people lose their mobile devices all the time, if a device is lost or
stolen it should be password protected at the very least so that someone else can’t easily view company
emails. We will dive way deeper into the broader impact and implications of security and organizational
policies in the security course that’s last up in this program. These are just few of the policy questions
that can come up. Whenever policies are decided upon, have to be documented somewhere. As you
know from a lesson in documentation in the first course, it’s supercritical to maintain good
documentation. I you are managing systems; you will be responsible for documenting your company’s
polices, routine procedures and more. You can store this documentation on internal wiki site, file server,
software, wherever. The takeaway here is that having documentation of polices already available to
your employees will help them learn and maintain those policies.

IT Infrastructure Services
We have talked a little bit about the services that are potentially used an organization like file store are,
email, web content, et cetera. But there are many other infrastructure services that you need to be
aware of.

As a I.T support specialist doing system administration, your would be responsible for the IT
infrastructure services in your organization. Spoiler alert, there are a lot of them ahead. As always make
sure to rewatch any lessons if you need some more time for the material to sink in.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know, and neither are IT support specialists. So, how about getting
network access? That’s a service that needs to be managed. What about secure connection to websites
and other computers? You guessed it that’s also a service that has to be managed. And managing
services doesn’t just mean setting them up. They have to be updated routinely, patched for security
holes, and compatible with the computer within your organization.

Later in this course we will dive deeper into the essential infrastructure services that you might see in an
IT support specialist role.

User and Hardware Provisioning

In other responsibilities sys admins have is managing user and hardware. Sys admins have to be able to
create new users and give them access to their company’s resources. On the flipside of that, they also
have to remove users from and IT infrastructure if users leave the company. It’s not just user accounts
they have to worry about, sys admins are also responsible for user machines. They have to make sure a
user is able to log in and that the computer has the necessary software that a user needs to be
productive. Sys admins also have to ensure that the hardware they are provisioning or setting up for
users is standardized in some way. We talked in an earlier course about imaging a machine with the
same image. This practice is industry standard with dealing with multiple user environments. Not only
do sys admins have to standardize settings on a machine, they have to figure out the hardware lifecycle
of a machine. They often think of the hardware lifecycle of a machine in the literal way. When was it
built? When was it first used? Did the organization buy it brand new or was it used? Who maintained it
before? How many users have used it in the current organization? What happens to this machine if
someone needs a new one? These are all good questions to ask when thinking about an organization’s
technology. Sys admins don’t want to keep a ten year old computer in their organization. Or maybe they
do. Even that’s something they might have to make a decision on. There are four main stages of the
hardware lifecycle procurement. This is the stage where hardware is purchased or re-used for any
employee. Deployment. This is where hardware is setup so that the employee can do their job.
Maintenance. This is the stage where software is updated and hardware issues are fixed if and when
they occur. Retirement. In this final stage, hardware becomes unusable or no longer needed and it
needs to be properly removed from the fleet. In a small position, a typical hardware lifecycle might go
something like this. First, a new employee is hired by the company, human resources tells you to
provision a computer for them and setup their user account. Next, you allocate a computer you have
from your inventory or you order a new one if you need it. When you allocate hardware you may need
to tag the machine with a sticker so they can keep track of which inventory belongs to the organization.
Next, you image the computer with the base image for further using a streamlined method that we
discussed in our last course, operating system and you. Next, you name the computer with a
standardized host name. this helps with managing machines. More on the when we talk about directory
services later. In regards to the name itself, we talked about using a format such as username-location,
but other host name starters can be used. Check out the supplemental reading to find out more. After
that, you install software the user needs on their machine. Then the new employee starts and you
streamline the setup process for them by providing instructions on how to log into their new machine,
get email etc. eventually, if a computer sees a hardware issue, a failure, you look into it and think
through the next steps. If it’s getting too old, you’ll have to figure out where to recycle it and where to
get new hardware. Finally, if user leaves the company you will also have to remove their access from IT
resources and wipe the machine so that you can eventually re allocate it to someone else. Imaging,
installing software and configuring settings on a new computer can get a little time consuming. In a small
company you don’t do it often enough where it makes much of difference, but in larger company a time
consuming process just won’t cut it. You’ll have to learn automated ways to provision new machines so
that you only spend minutes on this and not hours.

Routine Maintenance
When you manage machine for a company, you don’t just set it and forget it, you have to constantly
provide updates and maintenance so that they run the latest secure software. When you have to do this
for a fleet of machines, you don’t want to immediately install updates as soon as they come in. that
would be way too time-consuming. Instead, to effectively update and manage hardware, you do
something called batch update. This means that once every month or so, you update all your servers
with the latest security patches. Your have to find time to take their services offline, perform the update,
and verify that the new update works with the service. You also don’t have to perform an update every
single time a new software becomes available. But, it’s common practice to do batch updates for
security updates and very critical system updates. And the security costs, we dive deeper into security
practices, but a good guideline is to keep your system secure by installing the latest security patches
routinely. Staying on top of your security is always a good idea.

Vendors
Not only do system admins in a small company work with using computers, they also have to deal with
printers and phones, too. Whether your employees have cellphones or desk phones, their phone lines
have to be setup, printers are still used in companies, which means they have to be setup so employees
can use them. Sys admins might be responsible for making sure printers are working or if renting a
commercial printer, they have to make sure that someone can be on site to fix it. What if a company’s
fax machine isn’t working? If you don’t know what a fax machine is, that’s not totally surprising. They’ve
been slowly dying since the invention of email. Fax machines are still alive and kicking at companies, and
they’re a big pain to deal with. Sys admins could be responsible for those, too Video-audio conferencing
machines, yep, they probably need to handle those, too. In an enterprise setting, sys admins have to
procure this hardware one way or another. Working with vendors or other or other businesses to buy
hardware is a common practice.

Setting up businesses account with vendors like Hewlett Packard, Dell, Apple, etc. is usually beneficial
since these companies can offer discounts to businesses. These are tings that sys admins have to think
about. It’s typically not scalable just to go out and purchase devices on amazon. Although if that’s what’s
decided, they could do that too. Sys admins must be sure to weigh their option before purchasing
anything. They need to think about hardware supply. So if a certain laptop model isn’t used anymore,
they need to think suitable backup that works with their organization. Price is also something to keep in
mind. They’ll probably need format approval from their manager or another leader to establish this
relationship with a vendor. It’s not just technical implementations of hardware that sys admins have to
consider. It’s so many things.

Vendor Life-Cycle for Custom Services and Products

Another important vendor life-cycle involves the engagement and management of service vendors. IT
Support professionals may need to engage and/or manage service vendor relationships as part of their
job responsibilities. Service vendors are often businesses that offer specialized services, products,
and/or skilled labor to other businesses. Many organizations outsource business needs to these types of
vendors as cost savings masures to temporarily augment staff, and to more efficiently manage company
time and resources.

Hiring temporary contractors on as as-needed basis can be disruptive, lengthy, and expensive process.
Employing a full-service vendor, on the other hand, simplifies the process to a single contract
agreement, allowing the vendor to assume responsibility to supplying and managing the resources
necessary to carry out your project. For example, your organization may chose to outsource a company-
wide computer system upgrade to a vendor that can supply a temporary IT workforce to implement the
large-scale project. Using a vendor for this project may save your organization the time, expense, effort,
and liability associated with hiring, training, and managing individual contractors.
Vendor life-cycle management for custom services and
products
Vendor life-cycle management is an end-to-end standardization for conducting business partnerships
with vendors. As a best practice for business management, organizations should develop standard
polices and procedures for the procurement and management of vendors.

The standard vendor lifecycle can be categorized into three contract phase and eight management
steps:

Phase one – Pre-contract

Phase one of the vendor lifecycle management process begins with an organization identifying the need
to outsource a process or project to a services vendor.

1. Vendor identification and engagement: An organization identifies potential vendors and

engages them to collect more information about the vendor’s business offerings and
capabilities. The organization will inform the vendors of the service need and will solicit
“requests for proposals” (REPs), “Invitations to bid” (ITB), or other similar proposal documents
from the vendor. The organization will select small number of promising proposals to analyze in
greater depth. Some organizations may have official procurement offices to ensure fair and
ethical vendor selections.

2. Vendor qualification and risk mitigation: The organization advances the shortlisted proposal to
the qualification stage. In this stage, the organization and/or procurement officers request
additional information from the vendor to help exclude vendors that might pose a risk to the
organization.

3. Vendor evaluation and selection: The organization and/or procurement officers evaluate the
vendor information collected during the qualification phase. The organization’s vendor selection
team analyzes the vendor information to determine each vendor’s health and stability as a
business, as well as their ability to deliver on the organization’s request. Some of the data points
used in this elevation and selection may include the vendor’s:

a. History: Dose the vendor have a clean business record?

b. Ratings and quality: What are other customers saying about the vendor online through
services like the Better Business Bureau?
c. Expertise: Dose the vendor have the experience, skills, talent, and/or expertise to
deliver on needed services?
d. Cost: Will the vendor’s proposal fit into the organization’s budget?
e. Offer compliance: Does the vendor’s proposal fulfill all of the requirements of the
organization’s request?
 f. Responsiveness and customer service: How long dose it take the vendor to responds to
the organization’s request? What is the vendor’s approach to offering timely customer
service?

Once a vendor is selected, the organization will negotiate a statement of work (SoW) and contract terms
with the vendor. Performance criteria, milestones, and deliverables should be well defined in the SoW
and Contract.

1. Vendor information management and onboarding: The selected vendor goes through an
onboarding process with the organization. Information about the vendor is recorded in the
organization’s procurement system and provided to the appropriate stakeholders for the
engagement. Information management is important to the vendor life-cycle management and
maintaining strategic relationship with vendors. The organization’s IT department may issue IT
equipment to the vendor for establishing secure and monitored connections to the
organization’s network. The organization might also offer vendors training sessions for the
organization’s relevant polices, procedures, expectations, system, network, tools, etc.

Phase two – Contract delivery

1. Performance management monitoring: Organization often assign a project manager to monitor

the performance criteria, milestones, due dates, and deliverables defined in the SoW and
contract. It is vital to vendor and project management to ensure the vendor is meeting the
contracted expectations on time and on budget. The organization should conduct regular
performance reviews and may request improvements to the vendor’s performance. How the
vendor responds to improvement requests is important to the business relationship and can
positively or negatively affect opportunities for future engagements.

2. Risk Management: Organizations and project managers should also monitor and analyze
potential risks during the course of the vendor engagement.

a. Supply chain risk management: If the vendor’s product or service depends on supply
chain, contingency plans need to be in place to prevent negative impacts to the project
if a disruption to the supply chain occurs. Additionally, it is important to ensure the
vendor does not create compliance problems with supply chains, as this risk might
impact the organization’s reputation.
b. Product upgrade limitations and other risks: Organizations must monitor risks related
to updating, maintaining, and upgrading the vendor’s deliverables. Especially important
is the availability and capability of the vendor to provide these periodic updates or
upgrades. Contingent plans should be define in case the vendor cannot meet this need.
3. Vendor relationship management: Organizations can support their relationships with vendors
by:
a. Developing a communication plan with frequent check-ins
b. Building and maintaining healthy partnerships
c. Ensuring all parties benefit from the engagement.
Phase Three – Post-Contract

1. Vendor offboarding: When the vendor project comes to an end, the post-contract closing
process is initiated. The organization’s project manager and/or procurement officer are often
assigned to facilitate the vendor offboarding. In this phase, the organization performs and
analysis to ensure the vendor has met all contractual obligations. Any residual obligations, like
warranties and post contract support are revisited, and sometimes revised, with the vendor and
relevant stakeholders of the organization.
a. Warranties: The organization should keep detailed records of any vendor or third-party
warranties provided for the deliverables from the vendor engagement. All stakeholders
should be made aware of the inclusions, exclusions, and expiration dates of the
warranties.
b. Post-Contract support: The organization should keep detailed records of any services,
like technical support, supplied in the post-contract phase. The organization’s contract
with the vendor should have a clearly defined maintenance clause or statement the
post-contract support is not included.

Finally, the organization’s project manager and/or procurement officer uses the organization’s
offboarding checklist to complete the post-contract closing. The checklist might include requesting the
vendor return IT equipment and removing the vendor identity profiles on the organization’s network. IT
support professionals might also be enlisted to ensure intellectual property belonging to the
organization is stored properly with necessary security precautions.

Vendor Life-Cycle for Support of Commercial Products

Commercial vendors of computer operating systems, software, products, peripherals, and other IT
equipment plan life-cycle schedules, or product roadmaps, for supporting their products. It is important
for IT Support professionals to keep track of these life-cycle schedules, especially the date when the
product will reach its end of life (EOL). The EOL date is the point at which the vendor plans to end all
support for the product and it is reclassified as a legacy product.

IT Support professionals should plant to update, upgrade, or replace a product before it reaches its EOL
date. Once the EOL date has passed, the vendor will no longer provide technical support, security
patches, or driver or firmware updates for the product. This lack of support can create a security risk for
computer systems and networks. Cybercriminals take advantage of legacy products that are no longer
being patched or updated. Warranties can expire on or before a product’s EOL date as well. This can
disrupt the normal IT operations if the product fails, as IT Support professionals must expedite
purchasing, implementing, and providing training for the legacy product’s requirement.

The details of product life-cycle support policies vary from vendor to vendor. However, some life-cycle
phases are common to most vendors:

1. Beta testing phase: Often, the first introduction of a vendor’s product to the public occurs
through a beta testing phase. Beta testing is used to collect product feedback from early
adoption tech users. This feedback is used to improve the product before it is available to the
 general public. For example, you might be familiar with Microsoft’s Windows insider Program.
Early adopters of Microsoft products can sign up to beta test updates to the Windows operating
systems.
2. Product release and primary support phase: When the beta testing phase ends and the vendor
has updated and repaired reported defects, the product will then become available and
marketed to the general public. It is normal for products to experience problems as a larger
group of end users implements the products into their unique computing environments.
Vendors respond by developing and releasing regular updates and security patches for the
product during this supported product life-cycle phase. It is critical that IT Support professionals
update the product regularly to prevent security breaches and other disruptions to the
product’s usability.
3. Extended support phase: Product roadmaps also include a phase-out period when vendors
introduce their next generation products. The vendor normally continues support for the older
product during this phase by releasing critical patches. The product is often phased out of the
primary commercial market, but resellers may continue to sell it as a used or unused surplus
product. Buyers should carefully investigate the warranty and support for the product if
purchased from a reseller.

End of life (EOL) phase: When a product has reached its scheduled EOL date, the vendor will end
support for the product. Tech support and warranties will expire. The vendor will no longer release
product updates, security patches, drivers, firmware, etc., leaving the legacy product vulnerable to
security attacks. Vendors encourage customers to buy the next generation product as a replacement for
the legacy product.

Troubleshooting and Managing Issues

We talked about troubleshooting a lot. In an earlier course. But it’s worth mentioning again, when
you’re managing an entire IT infrastructure, you’ll constantly have to troubleshoot problems and find
solutions for your IT needs. This will probably take up most of your time as an IT support specialist. This
could involve a single client machine from an employee or server or services that isn’t behaving
normally. Some folks, who start their careers in IT support deepen their knowledge to become system
administrators. They go from working on one machine to multiple machines. For me, I made the leap
during my internship as an IT support specialist in college at a semiconductor lab. The lab ended up
closing and they needed help deprecating the environment. So, what started as an IT help desk support
quickly transition to assist admin role. That opportunity was my golden ticket to dabble to active
directory, sub netting and decision making which is a core part of this job. Sys admins also have to
troubleshoot and prioritize issues at a larger scale. If a server that sys admin manage stop providing
services to a thousand users and one person had an issue about the printer, which do you think would
have to be worked on first. Whatever the scenario, there are two skills that are critical to arriving at a
good solution for your users. We already covered them in an earlier course. Do you know what they are?
The first is troubleshooting, asking questions, isolating the problem, following the cookie crumbs, and
reading logs are the best way to figure out the issue. You might have to read logs from multiple
machines or even the entire network. We talked about centralized logging a little bit in the last course
on operating systems and your becoming a power user. If you need a refresher to how centralized
logging works, check out the supplemental reading. Anyway, the second super important skill that we
covered is customer service; showing empathy, using the right tone of voice and dealing well with
difficult situations. These skills are essential to all IT roles. In some companies, sysadmins have to be
available around the clock. If a server or network goes down in the middle of the night, someone has to
be available to get it working again. Don’t worry, a system admin doesn’t have to be awake and
available 24/7. They can monitor their service and have it alert them in case of a problem. So how do
you keep track of your troubleshooting? A common industry standard is to use some of sort of ticketing
or bug system. This is where users can request help on an issue and then you can track your
troubleshooting work, through the ticketing system. This helps you organize and prioritize issues and
document troubleshooting steps. Throughout this course we will introduce types of services that a
sysadmin need to maintain and what responsibilities they have in an organization. We will also share
some best practices for troubleshooting when it comes to system administration. When you work as an
IT support specialist, systems administration can become part of your job. So it helps to think about all
aspects of managing an IT infrastructure in an organization. The more prepared you are the better.

In Case of Fire, Break Glass

Let’s take a bit of a dark turn and talk about disasters. Like it or not, something at some point will stop
working. No matter how much planning you do. This happens in both small and large companies. It’s an
equal opportunity problem. You can’t account for everything, but you can be prepared t recover from it.
How? It’s super important to make sure that your company’s data is routinely backed up somewhere.
Preferably, far away from it’s current location. What if a tornado stuck your building? And your backups
got swept away with it? You would not have a building to work in, let alone, be able to recover data, and
get people up and running again. Later in this course, we will talk more about what methods you can use
to backup your organization’s data, and to recover from a disaster. We will try to keep things a little
lighter in the meantime. So far, you have learned a lot about the roles and responsibilities of a sys
admin. Some of it may seem like a lot of work. Some might even seem scary, being responsible for
keeping data available isn’t easy. But it’s a rewarding role in IT, and you’re already building your SA or
sys admin’s skill set by learning the fundamentals of IT support. Next up, we have got a quiz for you.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

When you have administrative rights for something, whether it’s one machine, a fleet of 100 machines,
or a cloud service with thousand of users, you need to be careful that you use these rights responsibility.
The most important thing is to avoid using administrator rights for task that don’t require them. For
example, you should not browse the web as an administrator user, try to minimize the time spent in an
administrative session. Do whatever you need to do, and once you are done close the session. In Linux
systems, we usually use the sudo command to execute commands as an administrator. When you
execute sudo for the fist time in a machine, you get a message like this. These principles apply to any
administrator rights regardless of the operating system or service you are in charge of Let’s take deeper
dive into what this all means. Respect the privacy of others. Do not use your administrator rights to
access private information that you have no business accessing. Having file system access to the
information stored in a user’s home directory doesn’t mean you should be looking at their personal files.
Being an administrator of an email server does not mean you should read someone else’s email. Just
because you can dose not mean you should. Even if you have a business reason to access a certain piece
of information, make sure you follow the appropriate process or polices to access it. You should not use
your administrator rights to bypass any rules. Think before you type. When you use your administrator
rights, your actions can have much greater consequences than you when you’re acting as a normal user.
Think through what you are going and don’t rush. Mistakes like deleting the wrong set of files, rebooting
the wrong machine, or breaking the connection that you are using to manage a remote machine can all
happen if you are not careful. You can train yourself to do this by writing out the steps you plan to take
before doing them. This helps in two ways. It allows you to plan ahead and serves as documentation of
what you did. Documenting what you did is crucial when using administrator rights. Listing the
commands you executed lets you repeat the same exact process in the future and fix any problems that
may come up later. In Linux, there’s a command called script. We can use it to record a group of
commands as they are being issued along their output. In windows power-shell, there’s and equivalent
command called Strat-Transcript. The output of these tools is useful for automating procedures.
Similarly, we can use the recordMyDesktop tool to record the interaction with the graphical application.
We put information about these tools in the next supplemental reading. The las of the sudo-command
principle is, with great power comes great responsibility. It’s a little cheeky but the point is serious. The
more you can do with your administrator rights, the more you can mess up. You can minimize the
impact of any mistake, and some-mistakes are inevitable, by making sure you can quickly revert your
changes if something goes wrong. You can do this by making a copy of the state before changing it. By
keeping your configuration in aversion control system or by documenting what steps you needed to take
in order to go back to the previous state. Reverting to the previous state is called a rollback. Some
commands are easy to roll back than others. For example, if you change a configuration setting from
true to false, the rollback is to set it back to true, but if you are deleting a file in away that it doesn’t
keep a backup copy, the rollback could be tough or even impossible. So before you make a change, take
a moment to think about what all that would look like and make sure you have copies of any
information that could be lost.

Change Management
IT change management is a standardized process for planning. Communicating, and implementing
technical changes to information systems. IT Support professionals are often responsible for
installations, updates, upgrades, migrations, etc. to an organization’s software, hardware, network
security policy data storage policy cloud platforms, and more. IT Support staff are expected to make
these changes while also minimizing disruptions to the organization’s IT services. By following IT change
management best practices, IT Support professionals can create robust plans for change rollouts that
protect business continuity. The change management plan is often reviewed by change board approvals,
management teams, and/or project stakeholders for risk assessment, feedback, and plan approvals or
rejections.

IT change management plans

Each organization will have their own change management policies, processes, and procedures.
However, there are several common items that should be included in change management plans as a
best practice. When proposing a change, IT professionals may create documentation or use change
request forms to details the following elements:

 Person/Team responsible for the change: Names at least one person as the responsible party
for overseeing the change management plan.
 Change Priority: States the urgency of the change. For example, critical security patches would
have a high priority and need to be scheduled ASAP. Whereas, a software update that merely
adds new features might be a very low priority and can be scheduled for a convenient future
date.
 Change description: Gives an overview of the planned changes. The change description should
also provide a list of the planned changes. For examples, if the change involves updating
firmware on several router models, the description should include which routers and models
will be updated, additionally, the plan should list the old firmware versions currently on the
routers along with the new firmware versions to be applied during the update.
 Purpose of the change: Explains why the change is necessary. For IT Support professionals, the
most common reasons for changes are operating system, software, driver, and firmware
patches and updates, as well as hardware and peripheral upgrades. Installations,
implementations, and redesigns of software and hardware systems are also common IT changes.
It support professionals should regularly evaluate the need for improvements and changes to
network security polices and procedures. Laws, regulations, and company policies may also
require changes to how organizations store, transmit, and protect data.
 Scope of the change: Describes the extent of the changes. The documentation should include a
list of all IT systems (hardware, software, etc.) locations, departments, individuals, vendors,
partners, customers, and other the changes affect, whether directly or indirectly. Any changes to
policies processes, or procedures should also be recorded.
 Date, time, and duration of the change: indicates when the change is scheduled to take place
and the duration of the change rollout. If the change is expected to create service outages, the
person or team responsible for managing the change should inform all affected staff about the
outage before the system are taken offline with minimal disruption. For organizations with
traditional Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. business hours, changes are usually planned
to begin in the early evening on a Friday, after end users have logged out for the weekend. The
change implementation process should include plenty of contingency time before the next
business day in order to test, troubleshoot, repair and roll-back any changes that are not
successful. When an unsuccessful change occurs, IT Support professionals may need to work
through the night and into the next morning Organizations and IT departments may opt to hire a
vendor to perform overnight system changes to adhere to company overtime policies and labor
laws.
 Changes rollback or backout plan: in case of primary plan failures, details a rollback plan to
return the affected systems back to their original state before the changes were attempted.
Additionally, a secondary or alternative plan may be included. This could be a plan to activate a
failover system to replace any problemed systems until they are repaired. IT Support
professionals should detail the steps involved in the rollback and/or alternative plans, including
the original configuration settings and software, patch, driver and/or firmware versions. Files
needed to rollback updates and patches should be downloaded and stored in an accessible
 location to simplify rollbacks, Cloud-based virtual systems can be restored in seconds by simply
using clones of saved previous CM states.
 Technical Evaluation: Records the results of any testing performed on the proposed changes in
a lab or sandboxed environment. The testing environment should be a similar to the target
environment as possible. For example, the same operating system versions, hardware parts,
drivers, firmware, etc. of the target system should be reflected in the lab/sandbox testing
environment. Setting up a testing sandbox for cloud platforms should be as simple as cloning the
virtual system(s) targeted for updates. The plans should also include metrics for evaluating if a
change is successful or not.
 System affected by the change: Lists all IT resources (including hardware, software, networked,
and cloud system) that will experience direct or indirect changes as a result of the change
rollout.
 Anticipated impact of changes: Describes how the planned changes are expected to impact the
affected systems. For example, if the change involves adding new servers to a resource pool, the
plan might describe that this increase in load capacity will result in system performance
improvements and faster server response times.
 Resources needed to implement the change: List the human resources, budget, time,
management oversight, subject matter expert (SME) consultations, training equipment,
hardware, software, parts, systems, tools, insurance policies, and any other resource needed to
complete the planned changes.
 Training for users impacted by the change: Outlines any training needs to help users adapt to
the changes. This might include classes on how to use new software applications, hands-on
practice with new hardware, a company-wide announcement for security procedure changes,
and more.
 Risk level for change: Describes how much risk is involved in making the proposed changes.
Some changes are high risk and might cause catastrophic failures if the plan goes wrong. For
example, an upgrade involving a single point of a failure on a critical system could create a
system-wide outage. In this case, it would be wise to implement a redundant failover system for
the critical system before attempting any other changes.
 Change instructions: Details each step of the planned changes. This should be formatted as an
instruction manual for the IT Support professionals to follow to ensure there is no guesswork
involved in implementing the changes.

Change board approvals

Some large organizations may have a Change Advisory Board (CAB). The CAB is a board of directors
appointed to oversee all implemented IT changes in the organization. The CAB can be the official
governing body to approve or deny change management plants. They may advise on needed
adjustments to the plant to meet business goals or to comply with regulatory compliance criteria. The
CAB may also assist with mitigating risk brought about by proposed changes.

User acceptance
Including a user acceptance process for information system changes is a best practice in IT change
management. IT change management plans can include a beta testing period similar to software
development user acceptance testing. This plan might include several days of testing by a select group of
users to ensure that the changes have been successful and that there are no hidden surprises caused by
the changes. The change management team for the plan should develop user acceptance criteria forms
for the beta testers to complete. The criteria normally include common activities that all end users
should be able to perform successfully in the new or changed environment. A period of time should be
reserved for fixing any problems the beta testers find. When beta testing is successful and the changes
have been accepted/approved by the users, the changes should become available to all appropriate end
users.

Recording Your Actions

When you are going to make changes in a machine. It’s very important to have a clear plan of what you
are going to and to store the actions that you actually took.

A common practice for system administrators that work with bug queues or ticketing system is to
include the commands executed and the output obtained in the corresponding bug or ticket. This is
recommended if the commands that need to be executed are few and straightforward.

However, there are situations where you don’t yet know which commands exactly you will need to
execute because there is some investigation that need to happen. In case like that, it can be helpful to
use a command like script for linux or start-transcript for windows.

Script

In the case of script, you can call it like this:

Scrip [Link]

This will write the contents of your session to the [Link] file. When you want to stop recording, you
can write exit or press Ctrl+D. The generated file will be in ANSI format which includes the colors that
were displayed on screen. In order to read them, you can use commands like ansi2txt or ansi2html to
convert it to plain test or html respectively.

Start-Transcript

In the case of start-transcript, you can call it like this:

Start-Transcript -path c:\[Link]

This will write the contents of the session to C:\[Link]. When you want to stop recording you
need to call Stop-Transcript. The file created is a plain text file where the commands executed and their
outputs are stored.

Recording Graphical Sessions

Performing system administration actions through a Graphical user interface is less common (as it’s
harder to automate and to perform remotely), but it is still something that may happen sometimes.

If you are going to performing an action that need to be done graphically and you can document what
you are doing, you can use a specialized tool like recordmydesktop for linux, or general video tools like
OBS or VLC.
Never Test in Production
Let’s start by defining what we mean by production. In an infrastructure context, we call the parts of the
infrastructure where certain services are executed and serve to its users production. If you host a
website, the service that deliver the website content to the users are the production servers. Inside your
company the servers that validate users’ password are the production authentication server. You get the
idea. So let’s say, you need to make an important change in your production infrastructure. It could be
adding a new service, changing the configuration of an existing service, updating the operation system
or maybe shutting down the service that’s currently running. How do you go about doing that? The key
to safely making these changes is to always run them through a test environment first. The test
environments usually a virtual machine running the same configuration as a production environment.
But isn’t actually serving any users of the service? This way, if there’s a problem when deploying the
changes, you will be able to fix it without the user seeing it. If you are in charge of an important service
that you need to keep running during a configuration change, we recommend that you have a secondary
or a stand-by machine, this machine will be exactly the same a production machine, but won’t received
any traffic form actual users until you enable it to do so. In this case, once you have tested your changes
in the test environment and are ready to deploy them to production, first, apply the changes to the
secondary machine. Once the changes to the other machine. For even bigger services, when you have
lots of servers providing the service, you may want to have canaries. Similar to the canary of coal miners
carry to detect toxic gases when entering the mines, you will use a small group of servers to detect any
potential issues in the larger changes you want to push out in the system. Once you verify that its works
correctly on those machines, you then deploy the change to the rest of the fleet. That way, if there’s an
issue with the change, only a subset of the users get exposed to it, and you can roll it back before it hits
everyone. Now, let’s say you need to make a minor change in your production infrastructure; should you
just go ahead and make the change in production? No, you should always try it in your test
infrastructure first. It doesn't matter how minor the change may seem; there’s always something that
could go wrong. Whether the infrastructure needs primary and secondary machines or a group of
canaries depends on how big the services and how important it is that it doesn’t go down. Even for the
smallest services, you should never make change directly in production. Always use a test instance first
and only deploy the change to production after verifying that it works.

Assessing Risk
We have mentioned before that you should always test your changes before deploying. Document what
you do and have a way to revert to the previous state. The amount of time and effort you invest in each
these steps depends on the risk involved. You should always have a test instance for trying out changes.
But it might not be worth having a secondary server if nobody cares about downtime. So, how do you
decide how much time and effort to invest? We can assess the risk involved by considering how
important the services to the infrastructure and how many users would be impacted if the service went
down. Certain services are mission critical. If the centralized authentication system is down, no one will
ever be able to log in. if the billing system unreachable, the company won’t be able to receive payments.
If your backup are lost, you have no safeguards in the event of disaster. But not all services are mission
critical. An information website isn’t as critical as an e-commerce site. An internal ticket system isn’t as
critical as an external customer support application. The infrastructure needed for a new installation
isn’t as critical as the one used for logging into existing machines. In general, the more users your service
reaches, the more you will want to ensure that changes are not disruptive. The more important your
service is to your company’s operation, the more you will work to keep the service up. You may have a
user agreement about the expectation of service availability. For example, in lots of companies,
disruptive maintenance is performed on the weekend. In these cases, it’s agreed that it’s fine if the main
file server is down on Saturday while you make any changes. You can also use these criteria to establish
priorities for fixing a problem. If the problem is preventing people from doing their work, finding a
solution to it should have a higher priority than solving minor annoyance that can be worked around.

Fixing Things the Right Way

As an IT support specialist, you will often be in charge of fixing problems. The problem could be in a
user’s computer, a server in your own infrastructure, a piece of code running in the cloud or somewhere
in between. So how do you go about fixing it? Let’s say you are dealing with a problem, either because
you found it or someone reported it to you. Before you start fixing it, make sure you cane recreate the
error as you will want to test your solution to make sure the problem is gone after you apply the fix. This
is called a reproduction case. And means you are creating a roadmap to retrace the steps that led the
user to an unexpected outcome. Like reaching an error page.

When looking for a reproduction case, there are three question you will need to answer. What steps did
you take to get to this point? What is the unexpected or bad result? And what is the expected result?

Let’s say that you are trying to fix a problem where a user can’t access a website page. Their
reproduction case would be navigating to the failing site with a web browser. The bad result is an error
page, where the expected result is a visible website. Once you have the steps you need to recreate the
unexpected result, and you know what the right result should be, you can try to fix the underlying issue.
Remember, always do this in your test instance, never in production. Make sure you document all your
steps and any findings. Having this documentation may prove invaluable if you ever have to deal with
similar issues again. Your future self will thank you. After applying your fix, retrace the same steps that
took you to the bad experience. If your fix worked, the expected experience should now take place. For
our page example, you can verify your solution by vising the site. Once you are applied the necessary fix,
you should ss the website content, instead of the error page.

Wow. We have come a long way and covered lots of different aspects of the responsibilities of a
sysadmin, including how to apply changes safely with the right amount of effort. Next, you will practice
these concepts using Qwiklabs. Then in the next module, we will talk about the technical details of the
infrastructure services used in IT. Se you there.

Module 1 Glossary
New terms and their definitions: Course 4 week 1

Cloud computing: The concept and technological approach of accessing data, using applications, storing
files, etc. from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection

Data Center: A facility that stores hundreds, if not thousands of servers

Deployment: Hardware is set up so that the employees can do their job

IT infrastructure: The software, the hardware, network, and services required for an organization to
operate in an enterprise IT environment
KVM Switch: Keyboard, video and mouse switch that looks like a hub that you can connect multiple
computers to and control using one keyboard, mouse and monitor

Maintenance: Where software is updated and hardware issues are fixed if and when they occur

Procurement: Hardware is purchased or reused for an employee

Production: The parts of the infrastructure where certain services are executed and serve to its users
production

Reproduction case: recreating an error to test a solution to make sure the problem is gone after a fix has
been applied

Retirement: Hardware becomes unusable or no longer needed, and it need s to be properly removed
form the fleet

Rollback: Reverting to the previous state before you made changes

Secondary or stand-by machine: A machine that is the same as a production machine, but won’t
received any traffic from actual users until enabled

Server: Software or a machine that provides services to other software or machines

Test environment: A virtual machine running the same configuration as a production environment, but
is not actually serving any users of the service

Module 2
What are IT Infrastructure Services?
Welcome back. In the las module, we learn the system administrators have lots of responsibilities like
maintaining infrastructure services. I.T. infrastructure services are what allowing organization to
function. These include; connecting to the internet, managing networks by setting up the network
hardware, connecting computers through an internal network, et cetera. In this lesson, we are going to
learn about the common I.T infrastructure services out there and what you need to know to start
integrating them into an organization. We will also dig deeper into each infrastructure service
individually. We will focus more on the physical infrastructure services like server, alson with network
infrastructure services that keep your company connected to the internet. In short, we will be servicing
all infrastructure services needs.

The Role of IT Infrastructure Services in SysAdmin

The are lots of IT infrastructure services that keep a company running. In a smaller company, a single
person could be responsible for all these services. In larger companies, teams of sys admins might
manage jut once service. In this course, we are going to discuss what you need to set up these services
as the sole IT person in the company. We will also give you an overview of some of the cloud services
that you can utilize if you wanted another company to run your services. Reminder, as we mentioned
before, cloud services are services that are accessed through the internet like, Gmail. We can access our
Gmail accounts from any computing device, as long as we are connected to the internet. By the end of
this module, you should be well versed in what services you will need to have a functioning IT
infrastructure for your company.

Type of IT infrastructure Services

There are lots of types of IT infrastructure services out there. We will start by giving you high level
overview of them in this lesson, then we will dive into the nitty gritty details on how you configure and
maintain these services and later lessons. Sounds good? Let’s get started. We talked about physical
infrastructure components of an IT environment in an earlier lesson. Remember that you can setup
different services to run your services on, like a server to run your file storage service. You can buy or
rent hardware for these servers and setup and store them either on site, or at another location.
Essentially, you manage these serves end-to-end. There’s another option. If you don’t want to be
responsible for managing the hardware tasks and updating our server operating system security patches
and updates, you can use the Cloud alternative to maintain your own infrastructure, which is called
infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS. IaaS providers give you pre-configured virtual machines that you can
use just as if you had a physical server. Some popular IaaS providers are, Amazon Web Services and their
Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 instances, Linode, which runs out virtual servers, Windows Azure, and
Google Compute Engine, which you have been using throughout this course. You can read more about
the different IaaS providers in the supplemental reading right after this video. Your company’s internal
network, is not going to be like your network at home. You are going to have multiple computers that
need to be on a certain subnet. You have to assign them IP addresses statically or using DHCP. The
network hardware has to be setup, wireless internet will probably need to be available, DNS needs to be
working et cetera. If your company is large, networking is usually taken care of by a dedicated team. But
in smaller companies, you will probably be responsible for setting up the network. Network can be
integrated in an IaaS provider, but in recent years, it is also been branched off into its own Cloud service,
Networking as a Service or NaaS. NaaS allows companies to offshore their networking services so that
they don’t have to deal with the expensive networking hardware. Companies also won’t have to setup
their own network security, manage their own routing, setup a WAN and private internets, and so on.
For more about NaaS providers, check out the supplemental reading. Let’s talk about the software that
your company might want to use. Do you need to type out word documents, as an email client,
communicate with other people, use operating systems, process spreadsheets or have any of other
software needed to run a business? I bet yes. The right software has to be available to your company’s
users. We have already discussed how to install and maintain software in machines. You have to deal
with things like licenses, security, updates, and maintenance for each machine. The Cloud alternative to
maintaining your own software is know as Software as a Service, or SaaS, instead of installing a word
processor on every machine, you can use Microsoft Office 365 or Google G Suite. These are both
services that you can purchase that allow you to edit word documents, process spreadsheets, make
presentations and more, all from a web browser. You can check out the next supplemental reading for
more about SaaS providers. Some companies have a product built around a software application. In this
case, there is some things that software developers need to be able to code, build and shape their
software. First, specific applications have to be installed for their programming development
environment. Then, depending on the product, they might need a database to store information. Finally,
if they are serving web content like a website, they will need to publish their product on the internet. If
you are building this entire pipeline yourself, you may need to setup database and a web server. The
programming development environment will also have to be installed on every machine that needs it. If
you want an all in one solution to building and deploying a web application, you can user something
called Platform as a Service, or PaaS. This includes an entire platform that allows you to build code, store
information in a database, and serve your application from a single platform. Popular options for PaaS
are, Heroku, Windows Azure, and Google App Engine. As you might have guessed, you can read more
about PaaS providers in the supplemental reading. The last I.T infrastructure service we will discuss is
the management of users, access and authorization. A directory services, centralizes your organizations
users and computers in one location so that you can add, update, and remove users and computers,
some popular directory services that you can setup are Windows Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and we
will dive a little deeper into both of these later on in this course. Directory services can also be deployed
in the cloud using Directory as a Service, or DaaS providers. Guess we can read more about DaaS
providers. That’s right, in the supplemental reading. There you have it. This is a general overview of the
most common IT infrastructure services you will encounter when handling system administration tasks.
While Cloud Services are a great option, it is super important that you understand how a service works
and how to maintain before you employ the help of a Cloud Service. Even though Cloud Service are
widely used in the industry, and have a lot of pros, there are also some cons. These include recurring
cost, and the need to depend on the providers service. We are going to teach you about the technical
details and the implementation of these common IT infrastructure services. We will cover everything
from setting up your own server, and figuring out which applications you need to be productive, to how
to setup multiple users and get your network services in order. By the end of this course, you will have
the foundational knowledge required to setup the IT infrastructure, for the small organization.

Supplemental Reading for IT infrastructure Services

For more information on the following topics check out the following links:

IaaS (infrastructure as a Service)

[Link]
providers/

Side-by-Side Comparisons of IaaS service providers

Earlier this year I wrote a comparison of several cloud infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) providers, to

serve as a starting point for anyone looking to take the plunge into cloud computing. The infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) market, however, has proven to be one of the most exciting ones in the cloud space,
and there have been several important movements. Such as changes in pricing strategies, the
appearance of new smaller players, and the entrance of some technology heavy weights. All these
changes led me to two conclusions: first, the original comparison needed an update. Since the relative
positions of the main players in the space may have changed; second, it would actually make more
sense to split the different IaaS providers into two groups: the “top-of-mind”, most well-known and
larger companies in this space, and all the new contenders and upstairs.

Once again, my focus is going to be providers whose services can be bought straight from the web, with
a simple credit card, without the need for any interaction with salespeople. The rationale behind this is
that if someone is going to run experiments and get into the cloud for the first time, they want to do this
without any kind of hassle or friction.

Once again, I tried to look at dimensions that translate the main promises of cloud computing. Such as
scalability, cost reductions, services levels, and others. But I also tried to focus on the main user
concerns; security, ease of migration, true reliability levels, and so on. I have also tried to group the
dimensions into related topics, so that comparisons would be easier. So here are the dimensions:

Cloud promises

 Cost reductions / optimizations

o Variety of Pricing Plans – The more variety offered (hourly, monthly, etc), the better a
provider is considered.
o Average Monthly Price – Estimated cost in US$ for a 1 CPU, 2GB RAM cloud server (or
the nearest best option), averaged over datacenters for companies with location-based
pricing, and averaged over Windows/Linux servers. When available, hourly pricing was
used, based on 730-hour months. Otherwise. Monthly pricing was used.
o Cost of Outbound Data Transfer – The cost, in US$ for each GB of outbound date sent
from the server. Companies that offer a per second (Mbps) connection for free have
cost listed as zero.
o Cost of Inbound Data Transfer – Same as above, but for inbound data.
o Storage Costs – Average cost per GB of persistent storage. While most VMs will come
with some storage included, if you want true persistent storage you have to do it
externally.
 Scalability and Automation
o Scale Up – If it’s possible to scale up your servers automatically, by adding more disk
space, RAM or processing units.
o Scale Out – If it’s possible to quickly and easily deploy new images based on existing
VMs.
o APIs – If the company offers APIs to interact with the server or not.
o Monitoring – A 3-level subjective scale measuring the easy availability of monitoring
tools:
 Poor – Companies that have no monitoring/alert solutions integrated, requiring
the deployment of third party tools or the extra services be purchased
 Average – Companies with very simple integrated monitoring tools (few
indicators or no alerting)
  Extensive – Companies with very complete integrated monitoring tools offered
for no additional cost
 Choice and Flexibility
o Number of Datacenter Locations – The number of different datacenter locations where
cloud servers can be hosted.
o Number of Instance Types – The number of different available instance types, in terms
of RAM, CPU, disks and so on.
o Supported Operating Systems – The number of different supported operating systems
(regardless of version) available as per-configured images.

User Concerns

 Security Features
o Certifications – If the vendor has compliance – and security-related certifications, such
as PCI or SAS 70.
o Protection – if the vendor offers the possibility of protecting servers with firewalls and
other security functionality. A 3-level subjective scale:
 Poor – Companies that only offer the most basic security features (such as a
basic firewall), or no features at all
 Average – Companies that offer a more advance mix of security features.
 Extensive – Companies that offer not only several security features, but also
some security automation.
 Ease of Migration
o Open Standards – if the vendor employs or supports open standards in cloud
infrastructure.
o VM Upload – If the vendor supports uploading your own machine images (made locally)
to the cloud
 Reliability
o Service Age - How long the service has been around.
o Server Level Agreement (SLA) – The uptime SLA offered (regardless of past
performance), in percentage points.
o Support – A 3-level subjective scale:
 Poor – Companies that only offer on-line forums for free; any other support
must be paid
 Average – Companies that offer a single type of 24x7 support for free (either
phone-based or online chat), in addition to forums
 Extensive – Companies with multiple support offerings included in the base
price

So we have jumped from 14 dimensions to 19, but they can give us a much better picture of the
different providers. I have also increased the number of companies in the comparison from 11 to 16.
This is a result of adding seven new companies (Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Google, HP, Lunacloud and Tier3)
and removing two of the existing ones (GoDaddy, who is not positioned as a IaaS provider, and
Realiacloud, who removed the information I needed for the comparison from their website).
Here are the two comparison tables in thumbnails that you can click on for a large view: (Cloud promises
and User Concerns):

You can also download the IaaS rating charts as an Excel spreadsheet.
Summary
Since the last time I made the comparison, the first thing that called my
attention was that the information available on the websites of IaaS providers
has increased greatly. It was much easier to find pricing data, SLAs, and so
on than it was before. In fact, some of the providers that I left out of the first
comparison, such as IBM, due to a lack of available information, have now
been included. I believe this marks an evolution in the market, especially
increased competition, which has led to better availability of information.

Once again, there is a wide variation in price ranges, from under US$ 50 to
over US$ 200. There was, however, a widespread reduction in prices. This is
evidence of two factors: the increased competition in this space, as well as
economies of scale that large IaaS providers enjoy and that they can give
back to their customers.

A couple more interesting trends are that most providers are now offering both
“scale-up” and “scale-out” features, that is, the ability to dynamically increase
storage, RAM and CPUs on a single server, as well as the ability to easily
clone servers based on predetermined images. This is the natural evolution in
this market, since this scalability is one of the greatest cloud promises.
Following this trend is the way that many providers are now allowing
customers to build entirely customizable cloud servers in terms of resources,
opposed to the fixed instance types that Amazon and Rackspace adopt.

Finally, I’m also seeing many providers basing their solutions on VMware
technology and allowing customers to upload their own images to the cloud,
which can be a very interesting possibility, especially for enterprise customers.

Once again, this comparison is far from authoritative, but it’s meant to serve
as a good starting point for anyone trying to easily see the similarities and
differences between cloud providers. This can help both the newcomers to the
cloud as well as people looking to change their current provider. It was based
on information publicly available on the web site of the providers, so there
might be variations in contracts for specific customers. Finally, if there is
additional information, dimensions or providers that I’ve forgotten along the
way, please share in the comments.
Sources

 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

How do Qwicklab works?

Now that we know more about the cloud and IT infrastructure services, let’s dive deeper into what
happens behind the scenes. Each lab has a preconfigured list of actions that need to be performed
during setup. This includes spinning up a virtual machine with a specific CPU and memory configuration,
and installing the VM with a specific operating system, windows or Linux. It also configures any other
Cloude resources needed for the lab, like additional virtual disks of the virtual machine. During the lab,
you can access the instances that Qwiklab created for you by using SSH or Remote desktop. You can
operate them in the same way you would use physical machines running that operating system. As you
may have realized, a virtual machine behaves almost exactly like a physical machine. Once the lab is
finished, Qwicklabs destroy the virtual machine, This way, any CPU, memory and storage used by the
VM is returned to the provider’s pool of available resources, so they can be used by other virtual
machines doing other work. So there you have it. You got a better idea for what’s going on behind the
scenes when you start Qwiklabs in our courses.

Server Operating Systems

When you want to set up a server, you essentially install a service or application on that server like a file
storage service. The net server will provide those services to the machines that request it. Maybe you
thought you would install services on, or use operating system like window 10. While that is an option,
typically, in an organization, you want to install your services on a server operating system. Server
operating system are regularly operating systems that are optimized for server functionality. This
includes functions like allowing more network connection and more RAM capacity. Most operating
systems have versions specifically made for servers. In windows, you have windows server. In Linux, may
distributions come with server counterparts like Ubuntu server, which is optimized for server use. Mac
OS is also available in Mac OS Server. Server operating systems are usually more secure and come with
additional services already built in. So, you don’t have to setup these services separately. You can read
more about the different server operating systems in the next supplemental reading. For now, just keep
in mind that when you install services on server, you should be sure to use a dedicated server operating
system.

Supplemental Reading for Server Operating Systems

For more information on Server Operating Systems check out the link below

[Link]
%20designed,security%2C%20stability%2C%20and%20cooperation.

Heads up: A big part of being successful in an IT role is the ability to be a self-led learner – someone who
finds key resources and reads up on the latest tech trends and solutions. The supplemental reading we
have provided have been designed to show you just some of the support materials available to you
online; they are not meant to be considered a comprehensive list. Feel free to add to the conversation
by posting other useful resource for learners to this forum thread. [Link]
power-user/discussions/forums/Z4bUA0QoEeiObQoMm0s4jA/threads/vW1PRkQrEeiv2hJ-XM1lZg

Server Operating Systems: OS

Types & How to Choose
Introduction

Server operating system are designed for platforms that act as web servers, application servers,
database servers, email servers, or other platforms running on a dedicated server.

Server operating systems offers various benefits compared to standard operating systems including
unlimited user connections, more memory, and advance network optimizations.

In this article, you will learn about different server operating systems and how to chose the best OS
server for your needs.

What is a Server Operating

System
A server operating system is and advanced operating system designed to run on servers. It has the
necessary features and subsystems to operate in a client-server architecture and serve clients’ requests.

A server OS is designed from the ground up to provide features suitable for multi-user, business-critical
applications. It provides the central interface for managing users, implementing security, and other
administrative processes. The focus of a server operating system is usually security, stability, and
cooperation.

Server operating systems facilitate the implementation of various server platforms, such as:

 Web Servers. A web server hosts programs and data, and responds to client requests for web
pages or other web-based services. Common web servers are Apache, Microsoft internet
information Services (ISS) and Nginx.
 Mail Servers. A mail server allows users to forward and receive emails for and from their
business and controls individual email accounts based on a specific domain.
 File Servers. File sharing involves a joint storage point for a business to store documents or data
– a network drive.
 Database server. Some server operating systems include database integration, which facilitates
dynamic web page building based on the database contents.
 Application servers. Server operating system must be able to run business-critical applications,
weather that’s a self-hosted CRM or a SaaS. A server OS usually functions as a shared
environment for various collaborative applications.
 Print Server. Another feature that server operating systems facilitate is print sharing, allowing
multiple machines to use a single printer.

Server operating systems are capable of handling several of the features mentioned above if the tasks
don’t require too many resources. If many clients/users need to be served or the hosted applications
require a lot of processing power, diversify the functions across multiple servers.

The following section lists and explains the most common server operating systems.

Common server Operating Systems

There is an abundance of operating systems available today. According to some statistics, roughly 80%
of all server use some variation of Linux, while about 20% of serves use Windows.

The key difference between Windows and Linux

The stark difference in market share is likely because Linux is free and does not required user-based
licensing like Windows.

Each OS has its pros and cons, and its ease of use depends on the user’s technical competence level. The
following list is not exhaustive, but it comprises the most common server operating systems.

1. Windows Server

Microsoft developed the Windows operating system family for everyday personal use and professional
use in server. The Windows Server OS supports enterprise-level management, data storage, and a vast
array or applications.
Windows Server feature virtual memory management, a complete desktop GUI experience, allows
multitasking and supports various peripheral devices. Microsoft usually provides 10 years of support for
windows server.

The pros of a Windows server OS are the intuitive GUI, support for symmetric multi-processor systems,
great third-party application support, and many versions to choose from. The cons are the need for
user-based licensing and more virus security threats compared to other platforms.

2. Linux

Linux is a family of UNIX-like operating systems that have all the features of UNIX. It is open-source,
available for free, facilitating multi-user, multi-process, multi-thread operations.
However. Linux servers require more technical knowledge – from installation to maintenance and bug
fixing.

One of the most common website hosting platforms, the LAMP stack, is based on Linux (Linux, Apache,
MariaDB/MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python).

Some of the most popular Linux server distributions are:

 Ubuntu Server
 Debian Server
 Fedora.
 OpenSUSE Leap.
 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
 Arch Linux.

The pros of a Linux Server OS are high security, a wide variety of distributions, integrated open-source
software, including high-level language compilers, and the ability to control the system using a GUI.

The cons are the lack of long-term support for some distributions and certain complex operations, such
as system updates.

3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

RHEL is apaid Linux desktop and server distribution created by Red Hat. Initially, RHEL was released as
the Red Had Linux Advanced Server and later renamed Red Hat Enterprise Linux As, which included two
distributions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.

The THEL source code is freely available, but Red Hat uses strict regulations that limit its official Linux OS
version redistribution. These limitations don’t apply to third-party derivatives that don’t include the no-
free components, such as Red Hat’s trademarks.

4. UNIX-Based Operating Systems

In the beginning, UNIX was a time-sharing operating system for small computers and over time it has
become one of the most widespread client-server environment operating systems. The UNIX
programming language is C, which facilitates the creation of UNIX ports for many machines.
The Pros of UNIX are a multi-user environment, built-in TCP/IP support, and a high level of stability and
security. The downside is that is paid, and different vendors sell different UNIX versions, so there is no
standard UNIX version.

5. NetWare

Novell NetWare is a server-based network operating system that required a dedicated server to
function. It was widespread OS in early LANs.

The pros of NetWare are its support for multiprocessors and large-capacity physical memory
management, as well as top-notch file sharing and printing functions in corporate networks. The OS also
offers a wide range of management interfaces, including a Web interface.

The cons are the price, poor support, a challenging installation process, and low third-party app support.

6. MacOS Server

The macOS Server is a UNIX-like server operating system based on macOS, developed by Apple. The OS
builds on top of macOS and Adds server functionality and system administration tools, as well as the
tools to manage macOS and iOS devices.

The macOS server is a great choice if you use Mac clients in your network, considering its ability to
create features for Mac clients easily.

The macOS Serer pros are easy administration, intuitive GUI, great support, and easy workload
distribution across multiple machines. Thus, it is easy to increase the processing power. The OS comes
with an unlimited user license.

The cons are that macOS server only runs on Apple hardware, which can be pricey, and there are not
many third party applications. Also while apple implements open source software in its system there are
changes specific to macOS, requiring working around some issues not present in Linux.

7. FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free and open source UNIX-like operating system. The OS maintains a complete system,
delivering the kernel, drivers, utilities, and documentation, and includes an extensive server-related
software collection. Thus, FreeBSD is easily configured as a mail server, web server, firewall, etc.

FreeBSD has its security team that inspects all the software shipped with the base distribution and
allows the installation of third-party applications from binary packages.

The pros of FreeBSD are that it is fast, completely free, has good security that utilizes the ipfw firewall,
and has a lot of tools available and owned by the FreeBSD Team.

The cons of FreeBSD are that it is not verry easy to learn since it has poorer community support than
Linux and lacks driver support.

Best Server OS for Businesses

This section explains which server operating systems best suit your organization based on its size. The
list is not exhaustive, but it shows that best server OS choices.

Small

The best OS choice for a small business server depends on the budget, server type, and the maintenance
team’s expertise.

If you have a budget that can handle a server OS purchase, a good OS choice is the Windows Server
Essentials (formerly windows small business server). It is a good solution for companies under 25 users
and a small maintenance team.

The OS features a familiar interface and broad third-party app support at a reasonable price. It facilitates
connectivity and includes email clients, remote access, support for mobile devices, file and printer
sharing, backup and restore, and other features.

If you prefer a free and stable production OS, choose a free Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu Server or
Debian.

Both Linux distributions are very popular and stable, featuring great community and official support. For
example, Ubuntu’s LTS (Long-term Support) releases receive updates for five years.

Linux requires extensive knowledge, so make sure to have a knowledgeable system admin to handle
configuration and the more complex operations.

Medium

For a medium-sized business, it’s essential to choose an OS that allows your business to grow. However,
you don’t want heavy investments you may not need.

Because of their scalability, Linux distributions are possibly the best choice for a medium-sized business.
An example is Ubuntu server, a free, stable, easy-to-install OS with a trusted name. since it is open-
source, it feature extensive customizability, allowing you to tailor the OS to your business needs.

Saving money on an OS means a bigger budget for scaling and implementing security features.

Other solution that come with a price tag, but are cost-effective, are RHEL and Windows server Standard
Edition.

Large

Choosing an OS for a large business depends on the server type and its function. For example, a
Windows server in an Active domain is a good choice for a file server, authentication server, or email
server, ON the other hand, both Windows and Linux are good choices for a web server.

For example, the Windows Server Datacenter Edition is a good choice for a highly virtualized datacenter
or a cloud environment. The OS allows for an unlimited number of windows server instances on a
server, both in physical and virtual environments.

On the other hand, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is an open source operating system. It is
designed for extensive workloads in large data centers, but also for single-server environments. SLES is
subscription-based and provides access to patches, fixes and security updates through the SLES
customer portal.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you should know more about the most common server operating systems and
how to choose the best fit for your business.

If you still can’t decide, read our blogs on Linux vs Windows Server and CentOS vs Ubuntu.

Virtualization
We discussed virtual machines in the last course and covered how to setup virtual machines on a
personal computer. In this lesson we are going to talk about virtualization can be an important part of
infrastructure services and systems administration.

There are two ways you can run your services, either on dedicated hardware or on virtualized instance
on a server.

When you virtualize a server you are putting lots of virtual instances on one server. Each instance
contains a service. There are a bunch of pros and cons to running your services on either of these
platforms. Here’s the rundown. Performance, a service running on dedicated hardware will have better
performance than a service running in a virtualized environment. This is because you only have on
service using one machine as opposed to many services using one machine, cost, server hardware can
be pretty expensive. If you put a service on one piece of dedicated hardware and have to do that for
nine other services, it start to add up. One of the huge benefits to virtualizing your services is that you
can have ten services running on ten different virtual instances, all on one physical server.

Here's another way to think about this, in a typical server if you only have once service running it’s
probably only takin up 10-20% of you CP utilization, the rest of the hardware isn’t being utilized. You can
add plenty more services to the physical server and still have a good threshold for resource utilization.

It’s cheaper to run several services on one machine than it is to run many services on multiple machine.
Maintenance, servers require hardware maintenance and routine operating system updates. Sometimes
you need to take the service offline to do that maintenance. With virtualized service, you can quickly
stop your service or migrate them to another physical server, then take as much time as you need for
maintenance. Virtualized service makes server maintenance much easier to do.

Points of failure, when you put a service on one physical machine and that machine has issues, you are
entering a world of trouble. With virtualized services, you can easily move services off a physical
machine and spin up the same service on a different machine as a backup. You could also do this with a
physical server, but that could become costly if you account for multiple server. Pro tip, you can prevent
a single point of failure on a physical machine if you have redundant servers set up, meaning you have
duplicate servers as a backup. You will learn about backups in the upcoming module.

As you can see there are lots of benefits to using virtualized servers, just make sure to weigh the pros
and cons of visualizing your service and using dedicated server hardware, that way you can make the
right choice for your company.
Remote Access Revisited
Another important part of physical infrastructure services is the ability to connect to your infrastructure
from anywhere in the world.

We talked about remote access in an earlier course, and we have been using it all throughout this
program to connect to our lab machines. In this lesson, we are going to discuss what’s needed to setup
for remote access for a small organization. As a systems administrator, or as anyone in IT support, you
will want to be able to remotely access another server or user’s machine so that you can troubleshoot
an issue. Or do maintenance from wherever you may be.

In Linux, the most popular remote access tool is OpenSSH. We have already learned how to SSH into a
remote computer in last course, and we talked a bit about what’s needed to setup SSH. But we will
quickly show you how to do this. To SSH into another machine, you need to install an SSH client on the
machine you are connecting from. Then install an SSH server on the machine you are connecting to. To
learn more about open SSH, you can check out the next supplementary reading. But let’s keep rocking
and rolling with how to install open SSH client on a machine. It’s super easy.

What your are going to do is always, go to my client machine, and simply run this command, sudo apt-
get install openssh-client.

And going, download package, perfect. So, it looks like my client has been installed. Next, you need to
install the open SSH server on the machine you want to access. Remember, the SSH server is just a
process that listens for incoming SSH connections. So, let’s go to the server and install the open SSH
server. So I’m going to do sudo apt=get install openssh-server.

Perfect, so it looks like my server’s up and running. So let’s go back to the client and do a test. I do ssh,
and to my server IP address with my username.

It asks for my password which is good thing.

Perfect, so as you can see, I’m connected to my sever. And one true way to test this if I go into my
desktop of my server and let me create a folder.

Now if I go back to my server, which is on this windows, and I list the files, you can ss the folder test, and
that’s it. Now you are able to SSH into a machine from another machine. Not too complicated, right?
Windows has similar tools that you can use. A popular tool to access the CLI remotely in WINRM or
Putty.

RDP is also popular if you want to access the GUI remotely. We have already discussed how to connect
to a machine using Putty in the last course. Just remember to install an SSH server on the machine you
want to connect to. We also already discussed how to setup RDP in the last course. Feel free to read
those lessons as a refresher. You can read more about the windows Remote Access tools in the next
reading. The takeaway here is that when you manage IT infrastructure, you can utilize tools like Remote
Access to work on your physical infrastructure. You will need to do a little bit of setup beforehand, like
installing a SSH client, SSH servers, and allowing remote desktop connections, etc. but it will be worth it
in the long run. Next up, we will tackle network service, See you there.
Remote Connections
Remote Connections

Previously, you learned about the fundamentals of remote access. In this reading, you will learn about
various methods and tools for connecting remotely. You will also learn about some of the security risks
related to using remote connections.

Remote connections can be used by IT Support professionals to troubleshoot remote systems. Remote
systems may include laptops, PCs, workstations, servers, data center machines, and other IT equipment
that supports remote access. Additionally, remote connections can be used for file transfers and
terminal emulations. IT Support professionals often use remote access software to save time by
eliminating the need to travel to the computer system’s location.

Remote access software can also be used for remote and flexible work arrangements, which have been
increasing in popularity in recent years. Numerous organizations have developed remote, hybrid, and
flexible work opportunities to give employees the option to work from home. Through these
arrangements, employers and employees have discovered the benefits of remote work. Employees save
time and money by avoiding the commute to work. Employees also report on improvement in their
work-life balance. Employers can save on the costs of maintaining physical offices. Employers can opt t
expand their hiring pool far beyond their physical locations by hiring talent in other cities, regions,
states, or even countries.

Multiple surveys have revealed that up to 95% of employers and employees in the United States would
like to keep remote, hybrid, and/or flexible work options permanently. Recently, Microsoft reported
that 66% of employers around the world are adapting their workplaces to support hybrid work models
(see the Resources section at the bottom of this reading for more information). Given this workplace
transformation, organizations are likely to ask IT Support professionals to design, configure, manage,
and/or troubleshoot remote connections for business networks.

Remote access software for IT management

Unlike RDP and VPN, there are some types of remote access software that are typically used only by IT
management and other computer support professionals. These remote applications help IT Support
teams manage and monitor large network more efficiently.

 Secure Shell or Secure Socket Shell (SSH): SSH is a network protocol and suite of tools that can
be used to establish a secure connection between a computer and a private network over the
internet. SSH is included with Linux/Unix and Mac Server operating systems. SSH provides
identity and access management protocols through robust password authentication and public
key authentication. SSH also encrypts data transmissions over the internet. Sessions are
established by using an SSH client application to connect to connect to an SSH server. For
security, SSH keys are used to provide single sign-on (SSO) services and the automate access to
servers for running scripts, backups, and configuration tools. SSH is primarily used by IT support
professionals to remotely manage file transfer and terminal emulators on Linux/Unix systems.
For example, IT support staff can use the SSH network protocol tool to establish an encrypted
tunnel from their computer to a remote server over a network. The SSH file transfer tool can
then be used to transfer a file, like a firmware update package, to the remote server. Finally, the
 SSH terminal emulator can be used to issue command lines to install the firmware onto the
remote server.
 Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM): RMM is used by IT Support professionals to
remotely monitor and mange information systems. Implementing RMM involves installing and
RMM agent on each endpoint within a network, including servers, workstations, and mobile
devices. The agents then send periodic status reports about the health of each endpoint to IT
Support staff. RMM tools also help IT Support professionals proactively maintain the network by
facilitating the remote installation of security patches and updates. If a problem occurs on an
endpoint, the RMM agent will create a ticket, classify the problem type and severity, and then
forward the ticket to IT Support staff. RMM systems enable IT Support providers to improve
efficiency in information systems management. IT Support providers can manage and even
automate routine maintenance for multiple endpoints simultaneously through a unified RMM
dashboard.

Remote access software

End user remote connections to business networks can be established using remote access software. IT
professional can also use this software to manage business networks remotely. There are multiple
options available for remote access software, each with their own benefits and disadvantages. The
following list provides a few options for various uses, workforce sizes, and network environments:

 Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP): RDP is a remote protocol developed by Microsoft. It is

compatible with most Windows and Mac Operating systems. An RDP solution my work well for
flexible or hybrid work environments where employees split their work schedule between being
physically in the office and working remotely. With RDP, end users can remotely access the
physical computers housed at their offices, in addition to the desktop, software, files, and
network access available to those systems. IT Support professionals can also use RDP software
to troubleshoot, repair, patch and update end user computers without needing to be in the
same room as the PCs.
 File sharing and transfer platforms: Cloud storage platforms, like Google Drive, Microsoft
OneDrive, and Dropbox, have largely replaced file transfer protocol (FTP) tools. File sharing
through a cloud platform provides the benefits of asynchronous file transfers, file transfer and
data encryption, customizable security and authentication settings, and the ability to file share
with multiple users simultaneously. File owners can share individual files, folders, or entire
drives. However, cloud storage might not be an appropriate option for organizations affected by
certain privacy laws, regulations, or other security concerns. These organizations affected by
certain privacy laws, regulations, or other security concerns. These organizations can still use
FTP applications based on SSH or HTTPS protocols for secure file transfers over the internet.

Network Services
FTP, SFTP & TFTP
Now that we are a little more familiar with some of the common aspects of physical infrastructure, let’s
move on to network services. A network service that’s commonly used in organization is a file transfer
service. Why would you want to have a services dedicated file transfer? Sure, you could probably carry
around a flash drive and copy files to each machine you work on, or even using remote copy tools we
learned in the last course. Or you could essentially store huge files and transfer files from one computer
to another using the internet. There are a few different file transfer protocol services that are used
today. Let’s take a quick rundown of what’s out there and what they do. FTP. It’s a legacy way to
transfer files from one computer to another over the internet, and it’s still in use today. It’s not a super
secure way to transfer data because it doesn’t handle data encryption. The FTP service works much like
or SSH service. Clients that want to access an FTP server have to install an FTP client. On the FTP server,
we install the software that allows us to share information located in a directory on the server. FTP is
primarily used today to share web content. If you use a website host provider, you might see that they
have a FTP connection already available for use. They can easily copy files to and from your website. SFT
is secure version of FTP, so it makes sense to choose this option over FTP. During this SFTP process, data
is sent through SSH and is encrypted. TFTP stands for trivial FTP. Is a simpler way to transfer files than
using FTP, TFTP doesn’t required user authentication like FTP, so any files that you store here should be
generic and not need to be secure. A popular use of TFTP is to host installation files. One method of
building a computer that we haven’t discussed yet is PXE or Pixie Boot, which stands for pre boot
execution. This allows you to boot into a software that’s available over the network is to keep operating
system installation files, but TFTP server. That way, when you perform a network boot, you can be
automatically launched into installer, this is a lot more efficient than having to carry around a USB with
an operating system image. Depending on your usage of file transferring services, you might want to
weigh the option. We mentioned. If you just want to share files between your computers in a secure
way and have a nice directory where you can access all the shared files instead of transferring them to
your machine, you will want to look at network file storage services instead.

Preboot Execution Environment

(PXE)
In computing the Preboot eXecution Environment, PXE (most often pronounced as / piksi / pixie, often
called PXE Boot/Pixie boot.) specification describes a standardized client-server environment that boots
a software assembly, retrieved from a network, on PEX-enabled clients. On the client side it requires
only a PEX-capable network interface Controller (NIC), and uses a small set of industry-standard network
protocols such as DHCP and TFTP.

The concept behind the PXE originated in the early days of protocols like BootP/DHCP/TFTP, and as of
2015 it forms part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard. In modern data centers,
PXE is the most frequent choice for operating systems booting, installation and deployment.

Overview

Since the beginning of computer networks, there has been a persistent need for client systems which
can boot appropriate software images, with appropriate configuration parameters both retrieved at
boot time from one or more network server. This goal required a client to use a set of pre-boot services,
based on industry standard network protocols. Additionally, the Network Bootstrap Program (NBP)
which is initially downloaded and run must be built using a client firmware layer (at the device to be
bootstrapped via PXE) providing a hardware independent standardized way to interact with the
surrounding network booting environment. In this case the availability and subjection to standards are a
key factor required to guarantee the network boot process system interoperability.

One of the first attempts in this regard was bootstrap loading using TFTP standard RFC 906, published in
1984, which established the 1981 published Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) standard RFC 783 to be
used as the standard file transfer protocol for bootstrap loading. It was followed shortly after by the
Bootstrap Protocol standard RFC 951 (BOOTP), published in 1985, which allowed a disk-less client
machine to discover its own IP address, the address of a TFTP server, and the name of and NBP to be
loaded into memory and executed. BOOTP implementation difficulties, among other reasons, eventually
led to the development of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol standard RFC 2131 (DHCP)
published in 1997. The pioneering TFTP/BOOTP/DHCP approach fell short, as at the time, it did not
define the required standardized client side of the provisioning environment.

The Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) was introduced as part of the wired of Management
framework by intel and is described in the specification published by intel and SystemSoft. PXE version
2.0 was released in December 1998, and the update 2.1 was made public in September 1999. The PXE
environment makes use of several standard client-server protocols including DHCP and TFTP (now
defined by the 1992 published RFC 1350). Within the PXE schema the client side of the provisioning
equation is an integral part of the PXE standard and it is implemented either as a Network Interface Card
(NIC) BIOS extension or current devices in UEFI code. This distinctive firmware layer makes available at
the client the functions of a basic Universal Network Devices Interface UNDI), a minimalistic UDP/IP
stack, a Preboot (DHCP) client module and a TFTP client module, together forming the PXE application
programming interfaces (APIs) used by the NBP when needing to interact with the services offered by
the server counterpart of the PXE environment. TFTP’s low throughput, especially when used over high-
latency links, has been initially mitigated by the TFTP Blocksize Option RFC 2348 published in May 1998,
and later by the TFTP Windowsize Option RFC 7440 published in January 2015, allowing

NTP
One of the oldest internet protocols in use today is the network time Protocol or NTP, it’s used to keep
the clock synchronized on machines connected to a network. You have probably seen NTP implemented
in you personal life if you have even been in a airport. Airports utilized synchronized clock systems and
many of the systems used NTP, this is because the information that you see on you departure and arrival
screen, has to match the time that the air traffic controller team seems for their airplanes. If only NTP
console for airport delays, in the IT world machines need to have accurate time across the network for a
lot of reasons. There are some security service like Kerberos, and network authentication protocol that
depend on the time being consistent across the network to work. It is important to keep the time
consistent and accurate across your company’s fleet. You can’t depend on the hardware itself to keep
consistent time, so you might want to set up an NTP server, there are different ways that an IT support
specialist or sysadmin can do this for an organization. You can use a local NTP server or a public NTP
server. To setup local NTP server, you can install NTP server software on our managed server. Then, you
install NTP clients on your machines and tell those computer which NTP server to synch their time to.
This is a great option, because you can then manage the entire process from end to end. The other way
to setup NTP is to use a public NTP server? Public NTP servers are managed by other organizations that
your client machines connect to in order to get synchronized time. This is an awesome way to utilize NTP
without having to run a dedicated NTP your own NTP service. Another good practice is to run you own
NTP server, then have that point to a public NTP server. This makes it so that you do not connect all your
clients to a public NTP server, and you don’t have to measure time synchronization. Whether you run
you own NTP server or use a public one, NTP is an important network service that you should definitely
integrated into your own fleet.

Network Support Services Revisited

There are a few networks services that are used internally in an IT enterprise environment to improve
employee productivity, privacy, and security. While they are pretty common, you might not encounter
them in small organizations. We are sure that you encounter them at some point in your IT career.
There are intranets and proxy servers. An intranet is an internal network inside a company, it’s
accessible if you are on a company’s network. Intranets can provide a wide range of information and are
meant to improve productivity by giving employees a greater medium to share information. Think of it
like the company’s website that’s only accessible to people on the company network. On this site,
documentation can be centrally located, teams can post news updates, employees can write two forms
and start discussions and more. Intranets are most commonly seen in large enterprises and can be
incredibly valuable tool for employee productivity. Another internal support service that’s widely used is
a proxy server. Proxy servers acts as an intermediary between a company’s network and the internet.
They receive network traffic and relay that information to the company network. This way, company
network traffic is kept private from the internet. The internet gets traffic through a proxy server, but it
dose not know where originally came from. It only knows the proxy. Proxy servers can also be used to
monitor and log internal company network activity. They can be configured so certain websites are
filtered from being accessed. Proxy servers are useful for providing privacy and security on the internet
and regulating access inside the company.

DNS
As a super quick recap, DNS is what maps human understandable names to IP addresses. It’s an
important network service to set up and maintain when managing a company’s IT infrastructure. You
don’t set it up correctly. No one will be able to access websites by their names. We don’t really have to
think about DNS on our personal computers. When you connect a brand new machine to the internet
and start typing a web address, it just works automatically. You don’t have to type in IP address or
anything, but something is happening in the background. When you connect to a network, you are using
the DNS server address that was provided by the router you connected to. It updates your network
setting to use that DNS server address, which is usually your ISP’s DNS server. From there, you are able
to access pretty much and website. Why do you need to setup your own DNS server? The DNS just
works out of the box. Well, there’s two reasons. First, if you are running a web service like a website,
you want to be able to tell the internet what IP address to reach your website. To do that, you need to
set up DNS. The second reason is that you probably want to work on your server or user machines
remotely. In theory, you could remote access into them through an IP address, but you could also just
use an easy to remember host name. To do that, you need DNS to map the IP address to the host name.
DNS for Web Servers
You might remember that we can use a web server to store and serve content to clients that request our
services. We will probably want to store website content on our webserver. If clients want to reach our
website, we need to set up DNS so that they can just type a URL to find us. So let’s talk about how DNS
gets set up for a website. First, we need a domain name. we can by domain names like
[Link]. We can purchase domain names like this from companies called
Domain registrars like [Link] or [Link]. Once we have our domain name, we want to
point our website files to this domain name. Our website files can be stored on cloud hosting provider or
we can decide to control this ourselves and store it on our own servers. Typically, domain registrars also
provide cloud hosting services but they can charge you a monthly fee to host your web files for you. Pros
tip, if you don’t want to utilize cloud hosting services, you can just run your own web server. Don’t
forget, there are always pros and cons to hosting a service yourself or offshoring it somewhere else.
Well if you are the sole IT support specialist for an organization, make sure to weigh all your options
before committing to an infrastructure service. Let’s assume that we do want to host our website files
ourselves. From here, we still need to point our nee domain name to where our web content is located.
We can do this in two ways. Most domain registrar can provide you with DNS settings and you can give
the IP address of where your content is stored. If you decide not to use your domain registrar to host
DNS for you, then you have to set up an authoritative DNS server for your website. Since we own the
domain name and host our web content ourselves, it makes sense for us to have the DNS servers that
know that information.

DNS for Internal Network

The other reason we might want our own DNS servers is so we can map our internal computers to IP
addresses. That way, we can reference a computer by name instead of IP address. There are a few ways
we can do this. One is using a local host file, which contains static ip addresses to host name mappings.
Let’s take a look at an example of this. Remember that we learned that host files in networking allow us
to map IP addresses to host names manually. In Linux, our host file is called, etc/hosts. It has an IP
address that points to [Link], which points to a name called localhost. This just references back to
the computer. Local host is commonly used as a way to access a local web server. If I change this ip
address mapping to [Link], then save and open a web browser to [Link]. As you
can see, it didn’t take me anywhere. It just take me back to my local computer. This is because a DNS
query first check our local host file, then our local DNS servers. If there’s an entry for [Link] in my
host file, it will go to that IP address instead Let’s say, I wanted to access Natalie’s computer at
[Link] and here host name is [Link]. I would have to enter this in my host
file for every single computer in my fleet. That’s definitely not a scalable option. What’s our next choice?
We can set up a local DNS server that contains all the organization’s computer names mapped to their IP
addresses. This is a more central storage location for this information. Then we change our network
settings for all our computers to use this DNS server instead of the one given to us by ISP. Finally, let’s
look at one of the last DNS options we can use from internal network. IT can be integrated with a
directory service, which handles user and machine information in a central location like Active Directory
and LDAP. Once we set up DNS and our directory service, it will automatically populate with machine to
IP address mappings. There’s no need to enter this information manually.
Supplemental Reading for Bind/Power DNS

For more information on BIND/PowerDNS Readings click here.

The Domain Name System is a core part of the Internet. There are many processes running in the
background while you are doing something as simple as catching up on a blog like this one. Once of the
most important processes in simple web browsing is performed mostly by DNS servers, yet many
developers have never learned much more than the name of one (or maybe two) DNS server. Let’s
change that today.

DNS as a part of the Internet

The domain name system, or simply DNS, may not be something you think of everyday. However, DNS is
an essential piece of what makes the internet usable When DNS is working properly, it’s enough to type
out domain name into the URL bar in order to open a website, but if it weren’t for DNS, we would have
to type in the IP address associated with that website in order to open it.

The different DNS server today

There are many different implementations of the DNS system today. Each DNS server represents a
different implementation of characteristics, such as the interface, platform support, packaging and
additional features.

BIND

BIND was designed in the early 1980 at the University of California Berkeley. Written by four students,
BIND was and still is continually upgraded and is often considered the standard conventional DNS server.
BIND is capable of serving as an authoritative name server as well as a recursor and supports many
advanced DNS features such as SNSSEC, TSIG transfers, IPv6 networking. It can be managed via the
command line or with a web interface. Even though it is mostly used on Unix-like operating systems,
BIND is completely cross-platform today.

PowerDNS

PowerDNS was created in the late 1990s in the Netherlands and quickly became one of the top
providers of DNS software and services. The server itself is written in C++ and has a strong community of
contributors. PowerDNS is just as full-featured as BIND, but is managed exclusively via CLI. Many choose
to deploy PowerDNS as it is a stable and rebust DNS server while also being backed by strong
community and commercial support.

Unbound

Initially written in Java in 2006, Unbound was rewritten in C by NLnet Labs as high-performance DNS
server software in 2007. The strong points of Unbound are its modular components with modern
features, Unbound is arecursive DNS resolver and so is not capable of acting as an authoritative name
server, but modules are available for DNSSEC and an integrated client resolver API. Unbound was
originally created for UNIX-like operating systems, but has since been ported to Windows as well.
Dnsmasq

Dnsmasq was first released in 2001 under the GPL. As free software, DNSmasq is a part of many Linux
Distributions today. Dnsmasq is mainly a DNS forwarder and a DHCP server managed via the command
line. This software is lightweight and considered especially easy to configure. DNSmasq is recommended
for small networks on all operating systems with the exception of Windows.

Erl-DNS

Erl-DNS is a full-fledged name server written in Erlang. It provides very fast query responses (30-65
us/response) and can be used as an authoritative name server with several storage techniques for zone
data. Erl-DNS lends itself nicely to being extended via Erlang’s module system and is also quite fault
tolerant due to Erlang’s “let it crash” philosophy.

Choosing a DNS server

At this point, you may feel that you are a bit overwhelmed. In fact, if I were to tell you to go out and
start running your own DNS infrastructure using the information I have given here, I would not be doing
you any favors. Running your own DNS server is easy, running your own DNS infrastructure that
performs well is stable and resilient is not so easy.

That said, there’s good news! You don’t have to run your own servers if you have got a great managed
DNS provider. Not only can you register or transfer domains, set up services like Google Apps and
purchase SSL certificates form the comfort of your domain management page with us, but you will also
have the comfort of knowing that someone who knows how DNS can bite you is running your DNS
servers.

What we use

At DNSimple, we use a combination of technologies throughout our entire stack. Our nameservers are
no exception. Presently we are running both Erl-DNS for our authoritative name servers, while also
running PowerDNS for its excellent secondary DNS support. Both allow us to run a PostgreSQL database
for zone data and we have proprietary methods for making zone updates available as soon as possible.
Additionally, we are able to run Erl-DNS across a total of 40 nodes in 5 different global points of
presence in an Anycast network. Additionally we are using other technologies which provide even more
distributed points of presence and further variegated technologies to help with our mitigation against
DDoS attacks.

We hope to provide easy to use, fast, and stable DNS service and our name server technology is just one
of the ways we do that. If your have not yet give us a ry. We provide a 30 day free trial and are always
willing to help out with any questions you may have.

DHCP
Another network service that will make your job in IT support easier is DHCP, a Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol. Either refresh on DHCP, just check out the DHCP lessons, the networking course.
When managing IT infrastructure and you want to connect a computer on a network you have two
options. You can grant a static IP address or give it a DHCP assigned IP address. When you use the static
IP address, you have to keep track of every IP address you assigned a computer and manually entered in
the network settings. If you enable DHCP, your computers will be leased an IP address from a DHCP
server. They will automatically get IP addresses and you don’t have to worry about manually settings
addresses. If you ever decide you need to expand your IP address range, you don’t have to change
anything on the client machines either it just happens automatically. To configure a DHCP server, you
will need to figure out which IP range you can use to assign IP addresses. If you want to integrate with
DNS you need the address of your local DNS servers what gateway you should assign and the sub net
mask that gets used. Once you saw the DHCP server software you have to configure the settings with
this information. Different DHCP server software manufacturers have different configuration setting
layouts. So you have to investigate the specific one you want to use. There are a lot of popular DHCP
server software you can use for this. Windows Server versions come with the DHCP service built in. once
you turn on your DHCP server and your clients are set to received DHCP address instead of static IP
addresses you should have working the DHCP settings . in the last lesson, we talked about how DNS ties
in with the DHCP. Well, in our DHCP configuration settings we can specify DNS server locations. The two
service then sync up and when DHCP leases out new addresses, DNS updates his IP address mapping
automatically. That’s a super quick overview how DHCP services are configured. Hopefully you can now
see why DHCP and DNS are critical network services for your organization.

Supplemental Reading for DNS and DHCP

For more information on DNS Software click here and for DHCP Software click
here.

What do Services Look Like in Action

We have talked about lots of services, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and other. As an IT support specialist, it’s
important to understand how to program that provide these services operate so that you can manage
them and fix any problems that pop up. These programs run as background processes, also known as
daemon or just services. This mean that the program doesn’t need to interact with a user through the
graphical interface or the command line interface to provide the necessary service. The operating
system ensures that the program is running. Each service has one or more configuration files that you,
as a system administrator will use to determine how you want the service to behave. Some services may
offer interactive interfaces that allow a user to edit the configuration and inspect the current status or
the usage history. Other services may rely on the system infrastructure for this, which means you will
need to edit the configuration files yourself. You have to know how to start and stop the service and
how to go through its logs to see any current or previous activity. Services are usually configured to start
when the machine boots, so that it there’s a power outage or a similar event that causes the machine to
reboot, you won’t need a system administrator to manually start the service. If you wan to decide
yourself when the service starts, instead of starting upon boot, you need to change the software
configuration to make it start when you want. Similarly, services are usually configured to restart if the
crash unexpectedly. If this is not how you want to setup, you may need to change the system
configuration that handles these properties. There are lots of services out there and each may require
specific knowledge regarding how to configure it and when and how to use it, but the general concepts
related to managing and configuring services are the same across the board, in the rest of this lesson,
we will look at examples of how to do this on both Windows and Linux.

Managing Services in Linux

As a system administrator, you will need to know how to look at the status of a running service and how
to stop, start, and restart running services. The exact way to do this will depend on the operating system
you are using. But the concepts are the same. Let’s look at very simple service Network Time Protocol,
NTP. We have called out before that NTP slows machines to synchronize their clocks. Ubuntu
installations include a daemon that runs on the machine and is in charge of synchronizing the clock using
NTP. We can check that there’s and NTP Daemon running on this machine using the service command,
service ntp status. We can see that there is an NTP service and the system tells us it’s running. This
service is keeping our clock on time without us even realizing it. If at any point it detects that the clock
had drifted, it adjust the time in a very small increment. It will add or remove 0.5 milliseconds per
second until it reaches the desired time. It uses very small increments so that other services which
depend on the clock to perform their tasks won’t be affected by a sudden adjustment of the time. Under
normal operating conditions, a computer clock would only see very small drifts from the Standard Time.
So these very small adjustments make sense. If the daemon detects the time has changed more than
128 milliseconds, it assumes that something else is going on and will not interfere. Let’s test this by
manually modifying the date of the system to a date in the past. I’m going to go ahead and type in sudo
date and give it a specified date, 2017-01-01 00:00;00. That specified date and enter, and then type in
date. We have set the date to January 1st 2017 at 12:00 AM, if we check the date after a few seconds, it
will still be set to January 1st 2017. A few seconds past midnight, it does not get adjusted. The NTP
Daemon saw the change, but since it’s more than 128 millisecond threshold. It’s not adjusting the clock.
How do we make it catch up to the present? There’s an option in the NTP daemon that allows it to
drastically adjust the clock when it’s starting. This is because the daemon is expected to start very early
in the process when the machine is building up. There should not be any time dependent services
running at that point. If we manually restart the service now, we will see that the date and time get
adjusted. Let’s type in sudo service ntp stop, date, sudo service ntp start, typing date, then Enter. We
use the Stop action to stop the service and the Start action to start it back up. Immediately after starting
the service, we can see that the date and time are set back to the present. We use the sudo command
to stop and start the service because any user can check the status of the service, but only an
administrator can cause it to stop and start. An alternative that’s available in most services is the restart
action, which doe a stop followed by a start. An alternative that’s available in most servies is the restart
action, which does a stop followed by a start. Let’s see how that one looks, first, let’s set the date back
to January 1st 2017 at 12:00AM, and then we will restart the NTP service. I’m typing sudo date, specify
the time 2017-01-01 00:00:00, hit Enter, then hit date, then hit sudo service ntp restart, then hit date.
Now you have seen how to check the status, start, stop and restart service in Linux. N TP is a very simple
service, but you can also use the same commands to manage much more complex services.

Managing Service in Windows

Like Linux, Windows also allows the system administrator to manage the services that are running on
the system. For this example, let’s look at the Windows update service. This service is in charge of
detecting software updates for either the operating system or other installed programs, downloading
them and having them ready to be applied to the system. Let’s get the status of the running service
using the get service command. So I’m going to go ahead and open Power Shell and I’m going to go
ahead and type in get service. I’m going to type in the shorthand form for Windows update service,
which is this. So, wuauserv is a short name for the Windows update service. We can see that the
windows update service is running and can get more information about it by running this next
command. Which is going to be get service wuauserv and then I want to open format list.

Asterix. This will show use what type of service it is and how it’s configured to run. It’s good way to get
additional information on the service you are interested in. as with Linux, any user can query the status
of the service, but only administrators can start or stop a service. If you try to do the next steps with the
normal user shell, you won’t be able to run the commands. Now, let’s try stopping the service and then
checking the status. For this, I’ll open an administrative power shell and run the stop service command.
So I’m going to go into my start and instead of clicking on it, I’m going to right click and then type in run
as administrator. Yes, to the security control.

So now, I’m going to go ahead and type in stop service wuauserve. Next I want to type in get service
wuauserve. So, this service has been stopped. In order to start it back up, we execute the start service
command, which I’m going to type in get service,

To show that the service is now running. Finally, you can list all services that are registered in the system
using the get service command.

We can also perform these same actions graphically using the services management console. So I’m
going to go ahead and click and start.

This console shows us all the services in the system. The ones that are running will say running in the
sales column, while the ones that aren’t running won’t say anything in the status column. We can find
the windows update utility at the end of the list. We can stop it by right clicking on it.

And then clicking stop.

And then right clicking again, and hitting start.

And there you have it. That’s how you get the status, stop and start services in windows.

Configuring Services in Linux

On top of the knowing how to query the status stop and start services as a system administrator, you
have to know how to configure services to meet the needs of your organization. For example, if you are
running a DNS server, you will need to configure the DNS zones that you want to serve. If you are
running a web server, you will need to configure the different sites and web applications that you would
like to have enabled. And in general, you want to apply any specific security and backup polices to all
your services. The details will depend a lot on the operating system and the service. But let’s talk about
the basics that you will need to know for all services. Most services are enabled as soon as you install
them. These are programs that are shipped with the defaults that are good enough to safely start
serving right away. But not all services can provide default values that are suitable for everyone. In some
cases you will need to edit the configuration files before the service can go live. On Windows most of the
configuration is stored in the registry. This can be modified using graphical wizards or using the set
service command. On Linux, the configuration files for the installed services are located in the /etc
directory. And while some software may ship graphical configuration editors, you typically have to edit
the configuration file with a text editor. Let’s experiment with a simple ftp server called vsftpd. A
services that gets enabled by default when installed. So I’m going to go ahead and type in sudo apt
install vsftpd to install the service. Once it’s done installing the service is already running. We can query
the status of the service by running service vsftpd status and see that it’s running. This tells us that the
service is already running. We can also verify that it’s running by connecting to the ftp server with an ftp
client. To do this, I’m going to go ahead and type in lftp local host. Lftp is an ftp client program that
allows us to connect to an ftp server. When we tell it to connect to local host will try to connect to the
ftp server running on local host. Now, let’s try to run the is command to list the contents of the current
directory. So when type in is and then type in exit.

This is failing because it’s requiring a username and password and we aren’t providing them. It makes
sense that the default behavior of the ftp server is to be locked down. If we really want to enable
anonymous connections will have to do that explicitly. Let’s modify the configuration file to allow
anonymous connections. To do that I will edit the configuration file for this service that’s located in
the /etc/[Link]. this will open up my conflict file and I’m going to go ahead and change and the
anonymous enable from No to Yes. Save my configuration file. By changing the value of the anonymous
enable setting from no to yes, we are telling the ftp server program that we want to allow anonymous
connections. We have made the change but we are not done yet. If we try to connect again, is will still
fail, Ls it failed. No one had exit. This will also happen with other services because most services read
their configuration when they start and then keep it in memory while they are running. In order for our
service to re-read the configuration, we need to tell it to reload. Reloading means that the service re-
read the configuration file without having to stop and start. That way ongoing connections are not
interrupted but new connections will use a new configuration. Let’s do this for out ftp service. Someone
typing sudo service, vsftpd reload. Once we have done this, we can try to connect again and this time
executing is will succeed. Let’s see it worked.

Configuring Services in Windows

We have now seen how to start, stop, restart, modify configuration, and reload this configuration for
Linux services. Let’s look at how you can do something similar using Windows. For this example, we will
be using internet information Services, the feature offered by windows to serve web pages. First, we’ll
need to enable this feature. We will use the turn features on and off option in the Windows Control
Panel. Click on the Turn Windows features on and off.

This opens the Server Manager, which we can now use to enable internet information Services. I’m
going to go ahead and click on Next, Next again, Next again so total of three times. I’m going to go ahead
and scroll down and look for web server IIS, I’m going to click on that and I’m going to Add Features,
click next and install.

I selected the web server option to have this service enabled on this Windows Instance. It’s now
installing all the necessary pieces to enable a web server on this machine.
It’s now done installing. When we close this window, we notice that there is a new option on the service
manager called IIS, We see here that we have an IIS service running on this server. We can configure this
service by right-clicking on the entry, and then selecting internet information services Manager. Then
I’m going to expand on our server, and then click on “Sites”. These are the websites that are handled by
this service. Currently, there’s only one called default website let’s see what this website looks like by
navigating to localhost. I’m going to go ahead and click on “Internet Explorer” and type in localhost.

Great, Our server is serving the default website. Now let’s add a different website to it. We go back to
our Windows Information Services. I have created an example site and stored in my documents folder.
Now, I will copy this example site into the inetpub directory, which is the directory normally used to
serve websites when using IIS. I’m going to hit Copy. Then I’m going to go into the inet directory, just C
colon backslash inetpub. I’m going to paste the example folder for my documents to the inetpub
directory. Then hit Continue. Security control. I have copied my website. Now let’s enable it in the IIS
Manager console. Let’s go back to the console. I can add a new website by right clicking on the list of
websites and selecting the add website option. Iam now presented with a bunch of options that I need
to fill in let’s select examples as the name of my website. Lets select the folder that I just copied as the
physical path for the website.

Finally, let’s select 8080 as the port. This last one is so that the default website can run in the default
port, port 80, while our example website can run in a separate port. I set up the new website. IIS tells
me that the website is already up and running. Let’s see if that’s correct. I’m going to go ahead and click
on Internet Explorer type up localhost, and type in colon port 8080, and hit Enter. Success, we have
added a second website to our web server. We have now seen hot to install, manage, and configure
Linux and Windows Services. In the next quick lab exercises, you will be able to try these actions
yourself. Have fun.