BSDA (Associate) System Administration Training

    April 22 - 25, 2008
    Tuesday - Friday
    9:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
    Fort Worth, Texas
    Class to be held near Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Texas Airport

Course Summary

This BSDA (Associate) course covers the the fundamentals of BSD system administration, including: installation (i386), system services, installing software packages, network configuration, and more. The class focuses on the requirements and seven study domains for the BSD Certification Group's BSDA (BSD "Associate") Certification Requirements Document (also known as the BSDA Exam Objectives).

This class is for users of Linux, Unix or BSD operating systems to provide beginning system administration skills for the popular *BSD operating systems. Similarities and differences for many administration tasks under Linux and the BSDs will be discussed. The hands-on class is taught using the four main BSD operating systems: DragonFly, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. (This class is useful for comparing different BSD flavours.)

This course is designed for students who are new to BSD administration. Some Unix shell experience would be helpful. The skills taught in this class will be very applicable for Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris administration. The BSD Certification Group provides certification exams for the BSDA. This class provides a pre-paid voucher for the BSDA certification exam but doesn't offer the exam itself. The course doesn't guarantee that the curriculum covers all BSDA requirements and participation in the course doesn't guarantee students successful passing of the BSDA examination.

Topics covered in this course include:

• Interactive operating system installations for DragonFly, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
• Upgrading the operating systems.
• Using binary packages and build-from-source packaging/ports systems.
• Enabling SSH server access using SSH keys.
• Introduction to various security techniques and tools.
• Mounting filesystems.
• Configuring NFS to share files.
• Backup and restore files and file systems.
• Introduction to various file system and disk maintenance tools.
• User and group account management.
• Keep track and analyze login accounting and system process accounting.
• Miscellaneous Unix administration tasks.
• Configure services to start a boot time.
• View, load and unload kernel modules.
• Configure system logging and log rotations.
• Basic email server startup.
• Networking setup and troubleshooting.
• Basic tcpdump skills for network traffic analysis.
• Enable NTP to set time.
• Configure cron jobs.
• Various Unix shell fundamentals.

Course Features:

• Voucher for taking the BSDCG BSDA certification exam.
• The BSD Associate Study Guide: The Beginning BSD Unix Administration Book (beta book).
• The Best of FreeBSD Basics book by Dru Lavigne.
• Complimentary BSD operating system installation CDs.
• Detailed course curriculum and hand-outs.
• Small classes with one-on-one interaction.
• Hands-on training, one system per student.
• Certificate of course completion. (This is not the BSDA certificate.)

Price

US$1560.00 for four-day, hands-on training including CDs and course materials.

15-percent discount for extra early paid registration by March 21, 2008. Group rates also available.

Registered students will receive an official BSDA certification exam voucher from the BSD Certification Group, Inc. This pre-paid BSDA exam voucher can be used to take an official BSDA certification exam when properly registered.

Registration

Class sizes are kept small, so seating is limited. Please email or call us to pre-register.

For more information and to register for this class, contact us today.

Course Details and Policies

• Prerequisites
• Guarantee
• Real-life Situations
• Course Materials
• Cancellation and Rescheduling
• Registration

Instructor

This class is taught by Jeremy C. Reed. Reed is a board member of the BSD Certification Group and helped with writing and testing the job task analysis survey. (While the instructor is affiliated with BSDCG, he doesn't have knowledge of the exam question pool and this is not an official course from BSDCG.) Reed is a NetBSD developer. For NetBSD, he assists with updating the Pkgsrc packages collection (including for security updates) and managing NetBSD Pkgsrc problem reports. And Reed is on the NetBSD www team and is a member of the NetBSD Foundation's public communications Executive Committee. He also is a DragonFly committer and helps with documentation and DragonFly packaging (pkgsrc). Reed is a member of the FreeBSD Marketing Team and assists with press release writing and publicity work. He built and ran the original BSD Today website for two years. And for the past seven years, he has been the editor for BSD Newsletter.com. Reed has written numerous articles in print and online media covering BSD and open source news and teaching various BSD and Unix skills. He has organized BSD lectures and booths at various events and he was an organizer for the Seattle-area BSD Users Group. As a professional administrator, he has worked with various versions of BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. He has implemented and professionally maintained various *BSD servers providing services for thousands of DNS zones and websites and tens of thousands of email accounts. Reed has taught around 60 lectures and classes and has taught hands-on BSD admin classes over 14 times.