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I'm trying to motivate a class to learn about some of the common types of services that are run on Linux systems, things like httpd, ssh, ftp, etc. What services should I teach? What would be the most interesting to the students while still being simple enough to work as an introductory teaching tool?

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    What exactly do you mean with Linux services? Apr 30, 2009 at 9:29
  • Is this to use them as clients, or manage the services on the server, or configure the services from a fresh install?
    – mas
    Jul 20, 2009 at 21:45

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What do you mean by "linux service"? My guess is that you mean run a class about some of the services typically run on Linux machines -- DNS, email, web serving -- in which case your classes aren't about Linux, they're about internet infrastructure.

Who is your target audience? Are they CS students, Windows admins, hobbyists, programmers? If they know nothing about the internet and aspire to be sysadmins or network admins then DNS is a pretty good place to start; it's fundamental to most other services and easily overlooked. Teach them how the name resolution system works, how data is (mostly) decentralized and what problems they can expect to see.

Same goes for HTTP and email: teach them what happens when you type URL into a browser or how your email finds its way to them.

Once you've worked out who you're teaching and to what ends you can figure out how to motivate them. If you're teaching CS students perhaps it'd be a good idea to show how failures in the internet infrastructure should be handled by software, or (maybe going OT) how algorithms are used in the modern internet (ie OSPF uses Dijkstra's algorithm to establish route weights).

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  • They are beginners, the majority of them dont understand very well a firewall. The class is about networking with linux, but if I start talking about tcp/ip I lose their attention very quickly. Im showing them apache, ssh, and ftp. Thanks for the dns and email idea. Apr 30, 2009 at 9:57
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I think, like much of teaching, there will be three groups of students:

  • the students who grok it. Tell them to go segment a network and place a firewall between the zones and they'll ask "should I make it IPv4 or IPv6?"
  • The students who will flounder through no matter what
  • The students who will do it if you pique their interest

So I'm going to target the 1st and 3rd by saying make it cool. For the second... well they'll have to do it if they want a grade.

So depending on what service you want to target, pick something cool in it, and get them to do that.

  • Squid? Get it running Upside-Downternet for the entire network
  • DHCP? Segment the netwrok into 10.0.x.x and 10.1.x.x and then have them use shorewall (I find it so much easier than iptables) to segment the network and have the upside-down script only affect part of it
  • Firewalls? DoS a computer or the server. Brute-force a password. Tell them to set up a rule so you can't access it to do that.
  • DNS? Have them redirect anyone visiting facebook to some other site. Redirect google to live.msn
  • FTP? Have them set it up, then do some packet-sniffing, steal a file, and then have them set up SFTP. Same with telnet and SSH
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