Introduction

The Labs are designed around a fictitious company (called Example Inc.). Example Inc. has offices all over the world. Example Inc. makes widgets. The company has all the usual bells and whistles that a modern company requires to conduct its business.

They have networked branch offices, with computers that perform different roles. Some of the computers are workstations, some are firewalls, and some are servers (file servers, web servers, mail servers, database servers, application servers, dialup servers, etc.

And most importantly to us in this manual – the company has administrators to administer/manage the computers. You, The Reader, will be the administrator at one of the branch offices.

You will be working with a partner (who is also an administrator) to make sure that the company’s systems are up and running all the time. Example Inc. deploys Rocky Linux on its systems, because the company has great taste.

Most tasks that can be accomplished from the command line (the shell) of the Linux OS can be easily accomplished from the graphical user interface (GUI) of the operating system. But most of your work will be done from the command line in this manual.

The idea is to get you very comfortable with the command line – after which there will be no task you cannot perform from the command line.

The command line is a very fast way to get things done and it is also one of the features of Linux (besides the Kernel) that you will find remains consistent in its look, feel, and functionality amongst the various flavors of Linux.