This first assignment will involve initially installing Suse and securing your system. We will be doing networking all semester so the first assignment will require installing default network security.
You need to install Suse which can require up to 10 GB of disk space, so the first decision is how much to install. I suggest that during the semester you primarily work with Suse, but also install another Linux distribution on your computer. You have about 17.4 GB of disk space on you computer (not counting Windows XP). You need to decide how to split the non-XP disk space. A good suggestion is perhaps 10 GB for Suse and 7 GB for the other Linux.
When I tested one of the computers, the parted program in the Suse installation was not able to partition the disk. Furthermore it was not aware that /dev/hda1 was a Windows partition. I rebooted and chose "Rescue" from the Suse boot menu. Then I used "fdisk /dev/hda" to work with the partitions. I deleted all the partitions except for partition 1 and created a 32 MB partition 2 (/boot for Suse), a 256 MB partition 3 (swap for both Linux distros), a 17.4 GB extended partition 4 and a 10 GB partition 5 (/ for Suse). This left a little over 7 GB for the second installation.
When you boot from the Suse install disk it will start with a menu of boot choices. Choose "Install" and it will proceed to boot linux and run the yast program to facilitate installing Suse.
Yast will start by allowing you to select your default language. Please choose English to make things easier on me. You can include support for other languages later.
You will need to create an account for yourself to use. It would be convenient to create it with the same name as your orca account to facilitate the use of scp between machines.
In addition to your account I want an account named "seyfarth" and another named "schick" to be added to the sudoers file. I will get with you to handle setting the passwords for these accounts. Use "Ray Seyfarth" as the full name for the seyfarth account and "Matt Schick" for the schick account.
It would be a sensible to create accounts for other classmates on your computer. It may prove to be very useful at some point.
Initially I want ssh to be the only way to connect to your computer from any other computer.
Your computers will be on the campus network. You are expected to exercise caution and respect for others. Please run "netstat -pant" and "netstat -panu" to try to check on available services. I will try to run nessus also.
I do not want to have iTech contacting me about hacking attempts coming from our lab. I don't expect you would really try to hack computers, but it is possible that you might try a network scanner and end up scanning beyond our lab. Please do not try a network scanner now. We will use nessus later and try very hard to limit the extent of the scans. In general sysadms consider scans to be the first step of a crack attempt. Let's keep a low profile.