CIS206 U5 Research Assignment - Essay Example

Administering a UNIX User Environment Administering a UNIX User Environment The article, Unix Administration, by David Malone focuses on various aspects that involve the administration of the UNIX user environment. It starts by outlining the duties of an administrator that generally involve ensuring the system functions as intended. Although the tasks of administrators vary depending on the environment, they are expected to add or remove users, hardware, and software. They also perform backups, documentation, auditing and troubleshooting of security features, and helping users (Malone 2011).

The administrator accomplishes the tasks mentioned above by using basic UNIX objects. Some of these basic UNIX objects are such as files, devices, processes, file system layout, privilege, and groups and users. Files, for example, are where programs and data are stored, and the administrator has to monitor three attributes of files namely; user, dates, and sets of permissions. Processes are the basic units of executing programs in UNIX and can be in states such as waiting for data, ready to run, or running.

Processes are specific to users or groups, and this regulates who can send or access signals to a particular process (Malone 2011). Another aspect covered in the article pertains to the tools used by administrators. The author identifies the man command as the most valuable tool for a UNIX administrator because it gives access to the online manual pages. Other essential tools used by the UNIX administrator to administer the user environment are such as grep, awk, find, sort, uniq, sed, diff, head, tail, and diff.

The author also touches on how to monitor the UNIX system. Monitoring is done on a daily basis in order to make changes whenever necessary. The administrator oversees some important aspects such as network performance, log files, available disk space, and running processes (Malone 2011). ReferenceMalone M. (2011). Unix Administration, Retrieved from http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/p/unixadminf-98.pdf on March 30, 2015