Training Track - Breakneck in Bracknell

Is it possible to turn a Unix innocent into a Unix system administrator in five days? Training Track sent contractor Griff Phillips to find out. Here is his report.

Requirements

The two-day Unix System Basics course turns a computer literate individual into a Unix novice. Next, HP-UX System Administration Basics, lasting three days, turns novices into system administrators. Normally, the student would undergo an extensive period of work experience between the two.

But not for me. When this week was over I was going back to the fusty world of S/370 assembler language and system-error dumps.

To be fair, the course isn't really intended to turn out fully fledged system administrators. The idea is that you learn enough to be of some use in a system administration environment, or at least to ask the right questions. The course does not cover installing Unix from scratch, network administration, troubleshooting, performance tuning or anything of that sort. The two main assumptions are that there's someone at the office who knows loads of stuff already and is prepared to help you, and that there's a working system ready for you to vandalise when you get back.

In particular, the HP-UX System Administration course assumes that you have a Hewlett-Packard (HP) Unix system. Anyone trying to run a #1.99 piece of Unix shareware out of a PC World Christmas cracker will have to improvise, as they won't have access to SAM, HP's system administration manager package.

First impressions

I've been to Bracknell before - 10 years ago, to be precise, when I worked for an electronics firm. It was dreadful, and I like to think that the directors went bust and have been languishing in a debtors' prison ever since. So I wasn't exactly looking forward to another trip into the industrial heart of Berkshire.

Yet HP's Pinewood training centre is very nice. Located in the leafy suburbs past Crowthorne, it is the sort of plush, modern complex you would need if you were trying to attract bright young computer professionals to work in Bracknell. Leather sofas, cable TV, Douwe Egberts coffee, bright splashes of modern art - it was better than most places I've lived in.

Huge windows everywhere meant you had a pleasant view of the surrounding countryside from almost anywhere in the building. Occasionally you could see lone figures jogging determinedly through the woods, as in the opening scene from Silence Of The Lambs.

The training room was superbly equipped. On every desk was a high-resolution graphics terminal, each one slightly bigger than Screen 2 of the National Film Theatre. An array of multiplexers and adaptors, which we would study in detail, attached the terminals to a collection of servers and workstations set up throughout the room. I was secretly confused by the term 'workstation', which referred to the system unit on the floor. In mainframe terminology, the workstation is the glass-fronted thing on your desk which locks up for five minutes every time you punch something into the keyboard.

The presentation

Our instructor was Julie Evans, a Unix consultant with bags of experience. Systems management is her speciality - she comes from a systems administration background, rather than programming. In fact, she referred to programmers as 'anoraks' and 'sad people' throughout the course. She didn't think much of users either, finding them a bit of a nuisance - always causing trouble and denying everything later.

Luckily she had plenty of time for budding systems administrators, and was extremely helpful. Her presentation skills were faultless - it takes a special technique to talk about device files and hardware addressing and have the audience hanging on your every word. Occasionally, I couldn't quite work out what level of understanding she expected from us. One moment she would talk to us like we were doing our GCSE resits, saying: 'And this is the file size, measured in what we call bytes.' Then she would address us as Unix professionals, casually dropping in terms such as 'fork' and 'daemon'.

The course was well paced, split fifty-fifty between tuition and lab exercises. Only once did Julie talk for a two-hour stretch, and that was covering Vi, the visual editor. Evans had her reasons:Vi is so abominable that if she had given us a break we would have stayed in the coffee lounge for a mental breakdown.

The lab exercises were excellent. We started on the first day by logging on and learning which of the two buttons marked Enter we were supposed to be pressing. By the end of the week we were happily plugging in DAT drives and reconfiguring the kernel to accept new device definitions.

In between, we spent a lot of time accidentally crashing each others' servers because of typing errors. I could see why Unix has a reputation as the computer security equivalent of the Queen's chambers.

Sometimes things went wrong. Usually it was us being stupid. Sometimes, however, it was beyond our control. One day, unknown to everyone, there were two systems floating around with the same name. Logging on became a game of random chance. We would log on and complete an exercise only to find that our work had disappeared next time we looked at the system.

It took some persistence to convince Julie that something was amiss but, once persuaded, she tracked down the errant system and remedied the problem in no time.

In a surreal bid to cheer us all up during this hard slog, we were brought a tray of cream cakes every morning. Not your dainty Mr Kipling french fancies, but industrially produced chocolate eclairs and apple turnovers the size of airline pillows. A half-bottle of Sauternes to go with it would have hit the spot nicely, but apparently HP's profit margins don't stretch that far.

The assessment

This was one of the most useful courses I have been on in years. I didn't know the first thing about Unix when I arrived - except that it was some kind of cowboy system written by college beardy-weirdies in the 1960s, and not as good as the cowboy systems written by blue-suited IBMers at the same time.

This turned out to be something of an oversimplification.

As the week progressed, the cultural differences between Unix and IBM mainframe systems became increasingly apparent. We learnt how to monitor system activity on Unix so that we could 'check if the users were doing anything important' before shutting the system down for maintenance. Most mainframe systems require three signatures from management and 24-hours notice before the cleaners are allowed in to dust them.

Security is not taken quite as seriously in Unix circles. Audit trails are very basic, and it takes no time to hack an ID from an unprotected terminal. If you want protection for your Unix system, you pay extra.

On the other hand, a Unix environment offers flexibility which MVS users can only dream about. Mainframe users usually phone each other up to talk - if you want a mail system you pay extra. It's no surprise that the Internet grew out of the Unix community.

By the fifth day, Unix was beginning to seem straightforward and logical.

We had an excellent grounding in the structure and concepts of a Unix system. The commands are pretty cryptic, but there is good online help and we learnt how to customise the environment with shell scripts and aliases to make it friendlier. The layout of the standard directories was well described, as were the formats of the files which need to be looked at when configuring a system. File systems and permissions, hardware concepts, device management, virtual memory, system shutdown and reboot, and user administration were all covered, reinforced in the labs and the course notes.

All in all, I reckon I've got the hang of Unix now, give or take a few minor details, such as C programming. So if there are any companies out there looking for a mainframe bloke who's just learned Unix, I'm your man - especially if you've got a forward-thinking attitude towards company perks. Otherwise, I might have to buy a PC-based Unix system to practise my skills on - and that would make me a sad anorak.

RATINGS BOX

Course Unix System Basics, and HP-UX System Administration Basics

Price #560 and #890 respectively

Duration Two days and three days

Level Application users, occasional users, system operators and those who will use the Unix operating system in a runtime-only environment.

Also, deputy system administrators and system operators Company HP Educational Services

Trainer Julie Evans

Facilities ****

Trainer ***

Course structure ***

Hands-on ****

Ratings

X Poor, **Fair, ***Good, ****Excellent

PERSONAL FILE: GRIFF PHILLIPS

My first encounter with computers was at school, where programming was done by filling out a coding sheet and sending it off by post to be fed into a computer at the local council. The output came back the following week. This seemed like such a doss that a career in computing was inevitable.

Unfortunately, my A-level grades were too high for me to qualify for a computer studies course, so I settled for electronic engineering, where I learned how to manufacture microchips using gallium arsenide, lollipop sticks and Araldite.

After university I joined IBM's International Airlines Support Centre.

Here I worked on IBM's real-time transaction processor ALCS (Airline Control System) and I have remained in the airline industry ever since. After three years at IBM, I moved to Melbourne and worked as a senior systems programmer at Ansett Australia, leaving after two years.

When I returned to England in 1993, I became a contractor, and I've worked at British Airways and Galileo. I am, currently, based at Sita UK in Isleworth where I am developing top-quality cargo applications using S/370 assembler language.