Lab: Virtual Lab Tour

Introduction

Today we will take a tour of the virtual lab environment we will be using to practice our skills as administrators. Our virtual lab contains two systems initially, we will add more later. The system named w01 is your workstation, it has a GUI and is connected to the Open Internet for your convenience. The system named s01 is our first server, it has no GUI.

Relax and take a deep breath, it's time to dive back into UNIX. This lab will require you to call upon the UNIX skills you already know and to build a few new ones.

Prerequisites:

Before you start this lab you must have:

The comp-10018 virtual lab appliance(s) containing: s01, y01, w01
Oracle VirtualBox software, found on all lab systems at the college and available from http://virtualbox.org

Before you start this lab you should be familiar with:

UNIX commands: ls, cd, cp, mv, ...

Grading:

You will demonstrate your understanding of this lab by uploading the output of a script file to Canvas and by completing an Canvas quiz.

Overview:

We will import the basic virtual lab environment and become familiar with the skill we need to perform the following labs.

Part A: Import The Appliance

All three servers, w01, s01, and y01 are packaged in a single appliance. Every time we import the appliance, two new virtual machines will be created along with their network connections.

Open Oracle VirtualBox software
Select "Import Appliance" from the File menu.
Find the appliance file on your system (comp-10018-vlab-revX.ova)
Click "Import"
Wait patiently, importing the VM could take a few minutes

Congratulations

You should now have the virtual lab systems available in VirtualBox.

Part B: Boot w01 and s01

This is probably the easiest part of the lab. Simply start each VM.

Note: For this lab we only need s01 and w01.

Part C: Explore w01

Most labs will start with us logging on to w01, so let's start there.

Log on to w01 as alice, her password is userpass
Check Internet Access
1. Open the Firefox web browser and log on to Canvas

Part D: Explore s01

Most of our administration work will be done on s01. But s01 does not have a GUI, just a very basic small console window. In this section we will log on to s01 directly at the console.

Log on to s01 from the console window. Log on as root, her password is adminpass
Answer the following questions:
1. What is root's home directory?
2. What is the largest file in the /opt/Mohawk/books directory? Hint ls -lh
3. How many files are in the /opt/Mohawk/data directory? Hint ls | wc
Check Internet Access
1. Use the ping utility to see if we can contact w01
```
ping  -c 3 10.1.1.10 
```
2. Use the ping utility to see if we can contact Google's free DNS server at 8.8.8.8
  This is a good server to use for tests as it usually up, and answers pings.
```
ping  -c 3 8.8.8.8 
```

Part E: Remote Access

Part D above should have shown us that the console on s01 is nowhere near as nice and the terminal window we can have on w01: it's small, we can't scroll back, we can't cut-and-paste. Fear not, we can access s01 from w01, not only do we get a nicer terminal, but we can work from out virtual desk, rather than hiking into the load, cold, and uncomfortable virtual server room (where they do not allow coffee).

Log onto w01 as alice
Open a terminal window
Logon to s01 from w01 over the network using ssh, the secure shell.
```
ssh root@10.1.1.20
```
Use the hostname command to verify that you are now logged on to s01
```
hostname
```
Let the world know we were here by creating a file named /root/hello containing the text I was here
- You may use vi/vim or nano to edit the file
- For an excellent vim tutorial run the vimtutor command (only available on w01)
- The nano documentation
- Don't forget the file name is hello not hello.txt
Logoff s01
```
exit
```
Use the hostname command to verify that you are 'back on' w01
```
hostname
```

Part F: Remote File Copy

We can use scp, the secure copy command, to copy files from one system to an other over the network. This is a very useful tool in every administrator's kit. The scp command works very much like the cp command you already know. To extend the cp command across the network we need to expand the format of the source and destination arguments to include user names and host names. Don't worry if this a little confusing right now, we'll have plenty of practice before the course is over ;) Some examples will help...

Create a file in alice's home directory on w01
```
ls > f1.txt
```
Copy a file, f1.txt, from alice's home directory on w01 to the /tmp directory on s01.
1. Use scp to copy f1.txt to s01
```
scp f1.txt root@10.1.1.20:/tmp/f1.txt
```
2. Log on to the console of s01 as root
3. Check that /tmp/f1.txt exists and has a recent modification date.
```
ls -l /tmp/f1.txt
```

Part G: Running A Grading Script

Throughout this course, including exams, we will run scripts on our systems to collect configuration information for grading. These scripts are located on Canvas and the configuration reports they output must be uploaded to Canvas for grading. But, our servers, like s01, are on the blue network and can not access Canvas. This is where scp comes to the rescue. We now will walk through this process.

Be patient and be careful, there is a lot going on here. Take a deep breath and go slowly.

These steps run on w01, as alice

Download the file host_info_1.zip to the Downloads directory.
Unzip the file.
```
cd ~/Downloads
unzip host_info_1.zip
```
Check that the unzip succeeded, (/home/alice/Downloads/host_info_1.sh should now exist)
```
ls -l ~/Downloads
```

Copy the script to root's home directory on s01

cd ~/Downloads
scp ./host_info_1.sh root@10.1.1.20:.

These steps run on s01, as root

Run the script on s01
```
cd 
./host_info_1.sh
```
Check that the host report was generated (we're looking for s01_report.html)
```
ls -l 
```

These steps run back on w01 as alice

Copy the report we just created on s01 to w01

cd
scp root@10.1.1.20:./s01_report.html .

Inspect the report with Firefox
```
firefox s01_report.html 
```
Submit s01_report.html to Canvas, placing it in the drop-box for this lab.

Part H: Quiz

Complete the Canvas quiz for this lab.

Part I: Put Away Our Toys

Like most computer systems, we should never just power-off our systems, we should shut them down gracefully.

Log on to s01 as root (root's password is adminpass)
Run the shutdown command
```
shutdown -h now
```
From the GUI on w01 select Shutdown from the alice menu found in the upper right hand corner
Shutting down y01. If you started y01, you can shut it down by closing the host VM window and selecting 'Send the shutdown signal'.

Note: Our systems are packaged as appliances so we can get away with just powering them down, they will be created from scratch next lab. This might come in handy at the end of a lab when time is short.