Name __________________________

ICOM 5017 Exam I

Fall 2008

October 21, 2008

Open books and notes. Only the course text and notes in your own handwriting, and prints of the course slides may be used. In the interests of originality and creativity please turn off all electronic communication devices including celulares, laptops, and pocket computing devices

1. The following relate to file systems, disk partitioning, and system installation. Please answer briefly, but avoiding the dreaded RADQ. Also, where a question has multiple parts, please be sure you address all of them; you may use one combination answer as long as it answers all the parts.

You have a system with one 80G disk drives, it already contains a Windows of some variety in a 30G partition, and because you were unfortunate, no partition located just before the 30G Windows.

a. Explain how you would partition these disks for a Linux Redhat system with /, /boot, /usr, /home, and swap – including how you handle primary and logical partitions, and some idea of how you decide on partition sizes. Of course you don’t want to disturb the Windows.

Most bootroms now can boot from a primary partition located anywhere on an LBA disk. This usually means you want to put / and /boot if needed in primary partitions – and then create an extended partition that will contain all the rest. The swap partition can go in a logical partition in the extended one. The maximum partition count for a single disk in the PC architecture is either 4 primary, or 3 primary and 4 logical. Often you want to have a FAT32 to share files between Windows and Linux.

b. What steps are necessary to get LILO or GRUB (your choice) to boot both operating systems.

For LILO you need to modify the lilo.conf file and then run lilo (usually /etc/lilo or /sbin/lilo) to make the changes take effect.
For GRUB, the configuration file is in /root/grub, usually, and can either be hand-modified or modified with Yast (in Suse).

c. What information must contained in /etc/fstab for this system. Assume you want to access some Windows partition read-write from Linux.

normally installation builds an fstab file. The details of adding a file system to this are usually obvious, but include a number of options such as RW and the file system type.

2. You wish to set up a small isolated network on a group of three machines (Where have you seen such a thing). You have no outside connection at all. One machine is to be running Windows, and two will run Linux .

a. Explain what address information you need to provide, and what files and/or menus you will use to set up this addressing.

You need to specify an IP address for each machine, and usually need to consult the hub documentation to set up an address for the gateway. With switching hubs, often the gateway functionality is absent; the hub is just a transparent link-level connection. You also need a netmask and an /etc/hosts file. Normally you use one of the IP address ranges such as 192.168.x.x that don’t go through a router.

b. Basically how would you share files between all three machines?

For Linux only, NFS is sufficient. To include Windows you need to start SAMBA on one of the Linux machines.

c. Given that you now are going to connect your network so one of the Linux machines is visible on an outside network. Explain what network interfaces you will need and how you accomplish this?

You need to make that host a dual-homed machine – if that host is to have a fixed IP address the nameserver administrator needs to know, otherwise you have to be speaking DHCP. You will usually need a separate netcard unless you are using a router – this needs to be started with an ifconfig in one of the rc files.