Week 1 - What is Systems Administration? Flashcards
What does IT infrastructure encompass? (4)
- Software
- Hardware
- Network
- Services
all required for an organization to operate in an enterprise IT environment
What are the 3 most common form factors for servers?
medieval, oven, wesley snipes
- Tower server (sit upright)
- Rack server (lay flat)
- Blade server (slimmer than rack servers)
What is a KVM switch? What does a KVM switch allow you to do?
connect… control…one
Stands for keyboard, video, and mouse
It allows you to connect to multiple computers using a single keyboard, mouse, and monitor
How do you define a data center?
A facility that stores hundreds or thousands of servers
What are “clients”?
Clients request the service provided by a server
What are 3 things an internet service handles for you in terms of datacenters?
police, down, hostess
- Security
- Updates
- Server Hardware
What’s a good way to cover your bases when it comes to your company using the cloud to store data?
Back up critical data in the cloud and on a physical disk
What are the 4 main stages of a hardware lifecycle?
pro, dep, mai, ret
- Procurement - purchase hardware or re-use hardware for an employee
- Deployment - hardware is set up so employee can do their job
- Maintenance - stage where software is updated and any hardware issues are fixed
- Retirement - final stage where hardware becomes unusable, no longer needed and must be removed from computer fleet
What does it mean to batch update?
Once every month or so you update the servers with the latest security patches and critical system updates so you don’t waste time updating as soon as updates come in
What’s the command in Linux that allows us to record a group of commands as they’re being issued along with their output?
script
As an admin, it’s crucial to ______ what you did to repeat the same process in the future and fix any issues
document
What’s a good way to “think before you type”?
Write out the steps you plan to take before you do them
(helps to plan ahead and serves as documentation)
What’s the Windows equivalent of Linux’s script command?
Start-Transcript
What other tools can we can use to record an interaction with an application besides Linux command script and Windows command Start-Transcript? (3)
record, o, v
- Record My Desktop tool (Linux)
- OBS
- VLC
What are 3 steps you can take to make sure you can quickly revert to a previous state in case something goes wrong (rollback)?
make a , keeping your config…, documenting what steps…
- Make a copy of the state before changing it
- Keeping your configuration in a version control system
- Documenting what steps you need to take in order to go back to the previous state
What is IT change management?
process for making
standardized process for making technical changes to information systems
What is production?
Production is parts of the infrastructure that is actively running and being accessed by users
If making important changes you should always run them through a test environment first. What is a test environment?
A test environment has the same configuration as the production environment machine(s) but isn’t actively being accessed by users
It’s recommended to use a secondary machine if you’re in charge of an important service that needs to keep running. What is a secondary or stand-by machine?
It’s a machine that’s the same as a production machine but won’t receive any traffic from users until you enable it to
What are canaries?
Canaries are a small group of servers that detect any potential issues in the larger changes you want to push out
What are 2 questions to ask when assessing risk for applying changes (to determine how much time to spend with test environments, secondary machines, etc)
How important…. , how many users…
- How important is the service to the infrastructure?
- How any users would be impacted if the service went down?
What are 3 questions to ask in a reproduction case before you start trying to fix the issue?
What steps, What’s the, What’s the
- What steps did you take to get to this point?
- What’s the unexpected (bad) result?
- What’s the expected result?
Before you start fixing something, make sure you can _____ it so you can test the solution later to make sure it’s fixed
recreate
What are infrastructure services?
they are what allow an organization to function (connecting to network, setting up network hardware, connecting computers to an internal network, etc)
hardware, software, file sharing services, org’s website, etc
