Last modified: Dec. 11, 2011

CIS 191B Final: System Administration

The final for CIS 191B will be a lab practical involving disaster recovery. When you come into the classroom, (virtually or physically), your cis191B virtual machine will have had a disaster with its primary hard disk. The only bootable partition remaining on the disk is the DOS partition, and it is unclear if all the files on that partition are unaffected. Fortunately, your secondary storage device (sdb) was not damaged. Your task is to restore your Linux system to its configuration on December 6th, with the exception that you do not need to restore the sda10 partition used for building your new kernel.

Your task is to:

  1. recreate the partitions for the 6 filesystems you have and for the swap space.
    The order of the partitions is not critical, but insuring that your partitions are at least as big as they were before is critical; your backups must fit comfortably within the partitions.
  2. recreate the 6 filesystems for boot, /, var, tmp, usr, and home. /boot and /tmp should be ext2 filesystems, the others, ext3.
  3. restore the root filesystem first, and then the dos, boot, var, usr, and home file systems.

    Make sure that all mount points have been restored on the root filesystem.
    Note: Level 0 restores must take place before level 1 restores.

  4. You do not need to recover your kernel source tree which you worked with in lab11.
  5. reinstall GRUB in the /boot partition and set the boot flag for that partition in the MBR.
  6. When you have completed the recovery, verify that disk quotas are working for your users.
  7. The idled daemon must be run by root's cron job from 8:00am to 9:00 pm on weekdays in December.
  8. At bootup, all filesystems should mount except /boot, and /usr should mount read-only.
  9. Your system should be able to boot to DOS, or Linux with either kernel: 2.6.18 or 2.6.19

Grading Rubric

14 points
The seven partitions created with their correct types and sizes.
12 points
The six filesystems created and labeled in their respective partitions.
18 points
For each file system that is restored from backup
6 points
The usr filesystem mounts read-only, and the boot filessytem does not mount at system start.
5 points
GRUB is reinstalled in the boot sector of the boot partition
5 points
User quotas function for users gimli and glorfindel.
5 points
The user has the option to boot either the 2.6.19 kernel, the 2.6.18 kernel, or FreeDOS at boot time, and boot successfully.
5 points
The idled daemon is being run and logging to /var/log/idle