SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION AND LINUX NOTE:

MCA 3rd year 5th semester

Developed by dharma
DNS: DNS organizes host name in domain hierarchy. A domain is a collection of sites that are related in
some sense, because they form a proper network (e.g., all machines on a campus, or all hosts on
BITNET), because they all belong to a certain organization (e.g., the U.S. government), or because they
are simply geographically close. For instance, universities are commonly grouped in the edu domain,
with each university or college using a separate subdomain, below which their hosts are subsumed.
Groucho Marx University have the groucho.edu domain, while the LAN of the mathematics department
is assigned maths.groucho.edu. Host on departmental network would have this domain name tacked
onto their host name, so erdos would be known as erdos.maths.groucho.edu. this is called the fully
qualified domain name(FQDN), which uniquely identifies this host worldwide.

Depending on its location in name hierarchy, a domain may be called top-level, second-level or third
level. More levels of subdivision occur, but they are rare. Some list details several top-level domains:

Domain Description

edu (Mostly U.S) educational institutions like universities.

com Commercial organization and companies.

org Non commercial organization. Private UUCP networks are often in this domain.

net Gateways and other administrative hosts on a network.

gov U.S government institutions.

BIND: The bind system call assigns a name to an unnamed socket.

#include<sys/types.h>

#include<sys/socket.h>

int bind(int sockfd, struct sockeaddr *myaddr, int addrlen);

The second argument is a pointer to a protocol-specific and third argument is the size of the structure.
There are three use of bind.
 1. Servers register their well-known address with the system. It tells the system “this is my address
and any message receives for this address are to be given to me.” Both connections oriented
and connectionless servers need to do this before accepting client requests.
2. Client can register a specific address for itself.
3. A connectionless client need to assure that the system assigns it some unique address, so that
the other end (server) has a valid return address to send its responses to. This corresponds to
making certain an envelope has a valid return address, if we expect to get a reply from the
person we send the letter to.
The bind system call the local-addr and local-process elements of association 5-tuple.

Symbolic Links
A symbolic (or soft) link is an indirect reference to a file, similar to an “alias” in Mac OS or a “shortcut” in
Windows. Suppose you use a particular file often, but it is deeply nested in subdirectory 4 levels down
from your home directory. Rather than typing the full pathname of this file (or changing to that
subdirectory) every time you want to access it, you can create a symbolic link to it in your home directory
(or somewhere else handy). Then whenever you want to access that file,you can just access the symbolic
link instead of the file itself. For example, suppose this commonly accessed file is called
˜/personal/misc/letters/contacts. To create a symbolic link to this file called buddies in your home
directory,
you would type:
ln -s ˜/my/misc/stuff/friends ˜/buddies
Typing ls -l in your home directory would now yield an entry like the following for your symbolic link:
srw-r--r-- 1 joe joe 40 Aug 4 11:01 buddies -> /home/joe/my/misc/stuff/friends
Referring to this symbolic link (with cat, for instance) will always refer to the real file
/home/joe/my/misc/stuff/friends.
You can also use symbolic links with directories.
Linux actually supports two different kinds of links: hard and symbolic (or soft). A hard link is a direct link
to a lower level
operating system maintained entry for a file on disk, and is less flexible than a symbolic link. Using the ln
command without the -s option creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.

/etc/passwd
All user information except the password encryption is now stored in /etc/passwd. This file
contained the password once, the reason why it continues to known by that name. The
encryption itself is stored in /etc/shadow.
Let’s take the line pertaining to oracle in /etc/passwd. There are seven fields hare and their
significance is noted below(in the order they appear in /etc/passwd):
 Username- The name you use to log on to a system.
 Password-no longer stores the password encryption but contain an x.
 UID-The user’s numerical identification.
 GID-The user’s numerical group identification.
 Comment or GCOS-user details.
 Home directory-The directory where the user ends up on logging in.
 Login shell-The first program executed after logging in. this is usually the shell(/bin/ksh).
What is shadow password file? Why is it required?
However, this would restrict access to other data in the file such as username-to-userid
mappings, which would break many existing utilities and provisions. One solution is a "shadow"
password file to hold the password hashes separate from the other data in the world-readable
passwd file. For local files, this is usually /etc/shadow on Linux and each is readable only by
root. Virtually all recent Unix-like operating systems use shadowed passwords.
With a shadowed password scheme in use, the /etc/passwd file typically shows a character
such as '*', or 'x' in the password field for each user instead of the hashed password, and
/etc/shadow usually contains the following user information:

* User login name

* salt and hashed password OR a status exception value e.g.:
o "NP" or "!" or null - No password, the account has no password.
o "LK" or "*" - the account is Locked, user will be unable to log-in
o "!!" - the password has expired
* Days since epoch of last password change
* Days until change allowed
* Days before change required
* Days warning for expiration
* Days before account inactive
* Days since Epoch when account expires
* Reserved

WHAT IS I-NODE ? WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS TYPES OF INFORMATION STORED IN IT ?

Ans.:- I-node: A structure maintained in a special area of the disk for storing the attributes
of a file. This table contains permissions of file, ownership details, time stamps and the no.
of links. However it does not contain the file name. Every file has 1 i-node. Each i-node is
accessed by i-node number.
Each i-node contains the following attributes of a file:
1. File type (regular, directory, device, etc)
2. Numbr of links (the no of aliases the file has)
3. The numeric UID of the owner.
4. th numeric GUID of the owner.
5. File mode (the triad of the 3 permission)
6. No. of bytes in the file
7. Date and time of last modification of file data.
8. Date and time of last access of file data.
9. Date and time of last change of the i-node.
10. an array of 15 pointers to the file.
Duties of a system administrator
A system administrator's responsibilities might include:

 Analyzing system logs and identifying potential issues with computer systems.

 Introducing and integrating new technologies into existing data center

environments.
 Performing routine audits of systems and software.
 Performing backups.
 Applying operating system updates, patches, and configuration changes.
 Installing and configuring new hardware and software.
 Adding, removing, or updating user account information, resetting passwords, etc.
 Answering technical queries.
 Responsibility for security.
 Responsibility for documenting the configuration of the system.
 Troubleshooting any reported problems.
 System performance tuning.
 Ensuring that the network infrastructure is up and running.

In larger organizations, some tasks listed above may be divided among different system
administrators or members of different organizational groups.
OR

C. DESCRIBE THE TASKS PERFORMED BY SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.

System administrator has to do a lot of responsible tasks, involving the management of the
entire system, ranging from maintaining security; performing backups and disk
management etc. the major tasks of system administrator are as follows:
(i) User add:- to open account for the new users of the system providing a log-in
name and a secret code(password)
(ii) Security control:- to ensure that the system directories (/bin, /usr/bin, /etc,
etc) and the files in them are not writeable by ‘group’ and ‘others’.
(iii) Password administration:- to force users to change their passwords after a
predetermined time.
(iv) File system administration:- as a system administrator he must understand
the file system internals well to check the file system regularly to prevent
corruption.
(v) Start up and shut down:- these two tasks are the administrator’s daily jobs.
These two procedures are run by automated shell script.
(vi) Terminal management:- to connect the work stations and PCS to the terminals
modems and mice.
(vii) Printer management:- this is an important part of administrators job. He has to
manage the print queues, adding and removing printers. Starting subsystems etc.
(viii) Network administrations:- as a network administrator, he has to configure the
network interface, check the network, configure the routers etc.
 (ix) Back-up strategy:- users often accidentally delete their own files and then rush
to administrator restore them. The administrator has to plan his backup
carefully so that he doesn’t backup the same file over and over.
(x) Others;- along with the above tasks system administrator has to perform a
lot of job s like re-linking the kernel, building a dynamic command line etc.

A. WHAT IS IPC?
Inter process Communication
IPC can be achieved by pipes, named pipes, message queue, semaphores, shared memory and
sockets. The first five forms of IPC are restricted to IPC between processes on the same host. The
last form is the only way that supports IPC between processes on different hosts.

PIPE :- We can think of the pipe as a special file that can store a limited amount of data in a first in
first out(FIFO) manner. On 4096 bytes. Generally, one process writes to the pipe, while another
process reads from the pipe. They are continuously filled at (written to) the “write end” and
emptied (read) from the “read end ” . The system keeps track of the current location of the last
read/write location. Data is written to one end of the pipe and read from the other. The OS provides
the synchronization between the writing and reading processes. By default, if a writing process
attempts to write a fully pipe, the system automatically blocks the process until the pipe is able to
receive the data. Likewise, if a read is attempted on an empty pipe, the process blocks until data is
available. In addition, the process block if specified pipe has been opened for reading, but another
process has not opened the pipe for writing.

Sticky Bit:- A process in UNIX runs by loading the executable file from the file system. This
means gathering all the blocks of the file which may be scattered throughout the disk and
pushing them to memory. When all active processes can’t be held in memory together,
some of them have to be transferred (swapped) to the swap partition. They are loaded into
memory when required. Thus the overheads for reading a file from the file system are quite
high, specially for large executables like vi or perl. There is a special mode of a file which
can reduce this time, and it is called the sticky bit. Sticky bit can be set using the chmod
command and can be set using its octal mode 1000 or by its symbol t.
For example to add the bit on the directory /usr/local/tmp, one would type chmod + t
/usr/local/tmp.
Only the super user can assign the sticky bit to any file with chmod

E. WHAT IS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A SOCKET AND A PORT?

Ans: - A socket is a network communications endpoint. The analogy is to a wire (the
network data connection) being plugged into a socket.
Sockets come in two primary flavors. An active socket is connected to a remote active
socket via an open data connection. Closing the connection destroys the active sockets at
each endpoint. A passive socket is not connected, but rather awaits an incoming connection,
which will spawn a new active socket.
A socket is not a port, though there is a close relationship between them. A socket is
associated with a port, though this is a many-to-one relationship. Each port can have a
single passive socket, awaiting incoming connections, and multiple active sockets, each
corresponding to an open connection on the port.
A port is a logical connection method two end points communicate with. Ports operate at
the Transport layer of the OSI.
Sockets are a means of plugging the application layer in. Sockets are determined by
an IP address and port number. A socket is one end point of a connection.

WHAT IS INIT PROCSS or RUN LEVELS?

Ans:- who’s the parent of the login shell ? generally it is a system process named init. this
process having the PID no. 1, which is responsible for the creation of all measure processes
of the system. init runs all the systems daemons and the getty processes at the terminal
ports. It takes instructions from /etc/inittab. init controls the run level of a unix system.
Each run level is normally a single digit(0-6), or an s or S. A distinct of processes (mostly,
daemons)is scheduled to run in each of these states. The system would be in any of these
run levels.
0 → System shutdown.
1 → System administration mode.
2 → multiuser mode
3 → full multiuser mode.
5 → the graphical environment mode in linux.
6 → shutdown and reboot mode.
S or S → single user mode

Firewall:
A firewall is a secure and trusted machine that sits between a private network and a public network. The
firewall machine is configured with a set of rules that determine which network traffic will be allowed to
pass and which will be blocked. In some large organization, you may even find a firewall located inside
their corporate network to segregate sensitive areas of the organization from other employees. Many
cases of computer crime occur from within an organization, not just from outside.

Firewall can be constructed in quite a variety of ways. The most sophisticated arrangement involves a
number of separate machines and is known as a perimeter network. Two machines act as “filters” called
chokes to allow only certain types of network traffic to pass, and between these chokes reside network
servers such as a mail gateway or a World Wide Web proxy server.

In practice, an internet firewall is more like a moat of a medieval castle than a firewall in a modern
building. It serves multiple purposes:
a)it restricts people to entering at a carefully controlled point.

b) it prevent attackers from getting close to your other defenses.

c)it restricts people to leaving at a carefully controlled point

Explain the structure of message queue as maintained by kernel.

The msg strictures are the internal data structure used by kernel to maintain the linked list of
messages on a particular queue.
We can picture a particular message queue in the kernel as a linked list of the messages, as
show in fig (a). Assume that three messages are on the queue, with length of one byte, 2 bytes,
3 bytes, and that the messages were written in that order. Also assume that these three
messages were written with types of 100,200, and 300, respectively.

Struct msqid_ds
Msg_perm Link link
Msqid structure NULL
Type=200
Type=100 Type=300
Msg_first
Length=2
Length=1 Length=3
data
data data
Msg_last
……
Msg_ctime

A new message queue is created, or an existing message queue is accessed with the msgget system call

int msgget(key_t key, int msgflag); msgflag value is a combination of constants.

Different is used in message queue:

Msgget(key_t key, int msgflag):A new message queue is created, or an existing message queue is
accessed with the msgget system call.

Msgsnd(int msqid, struct msgbuf *ptr, int length, long msgtype, int flag): we put a message on a
message queue using the msgsnd system call.
Msgrcv(int msqid, struct msgbuf *ptr, int length, long msgtype, int flag): A message is read from a
message queue using the msgsnd system call

Msgctl(int msgctl, int cmd, struct msqid_ds *buff): The msgctl syatem call provides a variety of control
operation on a message queue.

Explain the concept of 'Ephimeral Port Numbers'.

Ans: we know port numbers is assigned to application processes by TCP/UDP. The reserved ports are
Ephimeral ports

Describe the 5-entity tuple that may be used to uniquely identify a connection.
Ans: An connection defined by the 5-tuple completely specifies two processes that make up a
connection.
i) Protocol-TCP or UDP.
ii) Local host’s IP address (32-bit).
iii) Local port number (16-bit).
iv) Foreign/destination host’s IP address (32-bit).
v) Foreign/destination port number (16-bit).

Booting process in Linux:

In Linux, the flow of control during a boot is from BIOS, to boot loader, to kernel. The kernel then
starts the scheduler (to allow multi-tasking) and runs the first userland (i.e. outside kernel space)
program Init (which sets up the user environment and allows user interaction and login), at which
point the kernel goes idle unless called externally.

In detail:

1. The BIOS performs hardware-platform specific startup tasks

2. Once the hardware is recognized and started correctly, the BIOS loads and executes the
partition boot code from the designated boot device, which contains phase 1 of a Linux boot loader.
Phase 1 loads phase 2 (the bulk of the boot loader code). Some loaders may use an intermediate
phase (known as phase 1.5) to achieve this since modern large disks may not be fully readable without
further code.
3. The boot loader often presents the user with a menu of possible boot options. It then loads
the operating system, which decompresses into memory, and sets up system functions such as
essential hardware and memory paging, before calling start_kernel().

4. start_kernel() then performs the majority of system setup (interrupts, the rest of memory
management, device initialization, drivers, etc) before spawning separately, the idle process and
scheduler, and the Init process (which is executed in user space).

Power up/reset BIOS/boot-monitor

System startup

Stage 1 bootloader Master boot-record

Stage 2 bootloader LILO, GRUB, ETC

Kernel Linux

Init User-space

Operation

Operation
 IPC(08):
In computing, Inter-process communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data
among multiple threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more
computers connected by a network. For two processes to communicate, the operating system must
provides some facilities for interprocess communication.IPC techniques are divided into methods for
message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of
IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and
the type of data being communicated.

User process
User process User process User process

kernel Kernel kernel

IPC between two processes on a single system

IPC between two processes on different system

Utility of IPC_CREAT(08)

Create the queue if it doesn't already exist in the kernel.

POSIX Threads, or Pthreads, is a POSIX standard for threads. The standard, POSIX.1c, Threads
extensions (IEEE Std 1003.1c-1995), defines an API for creating and manipulating threads.Implementations of
the API are available on many Unix-like POSIX systems such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and
Solaris, but Microsoft Windows implementations also exist. For example, the pthreads-w32 is available and
supports a subset of the Pthread API for the Windows 32-bit platform.

Telnet-tcp port 23: It commonly used protocols for remote access. However it locks any type of
confidentiality no encryption mechanism.

Zero level backup: That stores every file on a particular disk or partition. If disk even crashes,
we can rebuild the system by restoring the entire backup to a new disk.
Incremental backup: It contain only those files that have been added or modified since the last
time a more complete backup was performed. Incremental backup may be chosen to consume
backup media. It takes less time to complete.

Bare-mental recovery: It is a process of rebuilding a system after catastrophic failure. Normal

bare metal restoration includes:

i) Install the OS from the product disks.

ii) Install backup software..
iii) Restore data
iv) Restore functionality by verifying the configuration files, permissions, etc.

Utility of “Finger” command: To get the details of users. It produces a list of all logged users on
the local machine. It can also provide details about a single user.

finger @hostname

finger usr@hostname

finger usr

What is the significance of /etc/fstab

The fstab (/etc/fstab) (or file systems table) file is a system configuration file commonly found
on Unix systems. The fstab file typically lists all available disks and disk partitions, and indicates
how they are to be initialized or otherwise integrated into the overall system's file system. fstab is
still used for basic system configuration, notably of a system's main hard drive and startup file
system, but for other uses has been superseded in recent years by automatic mounting.

The fstab file is most commonly used by the mount command, which reads the fstab file to
determine which options should be used when mounting the specified device. It is the duty of the
system administrator to properly create and maintain this file.
What is the importance of /boot partition?

A boot sector is a sector of a hard disk, floppy disk, or similar data storage device that contains
code for booting programs (usually, but not necessarily, operating systems) stored in other parts
of the disk. On an IBM PC compatible machine, the BIOS selects a boot device, then it copies
the first sector from the device (which may be an MBR, VBR or any executable code), to address
location.

If the device is a hard disk, that will be an MBR. It is the code in the MBR which generally
understands disk partitioning, and in turn, is responsible for loading and running the VBR of
whichever primary partition is set to boot (the active partition). The VBR then loads a second-
stage bootloader from another location on the disk.

What is the advantage of share memory over message queue(08)?

Both shared memory and message queues can be used to exchange information between processes. But
when message queues are used, when a process post a message in the queue and if another
process reads it from the queue then the queue will be empty unlike shared memory where n
number of processes can access the shared memory and still the contents remain there until its
deliberately removed. So when i want to use an IPC between processes and i want the contents to
be there until deliberately removed i feel shared memory is the option and not the message
queues.

malloc(), calloc() and realloc()

There two basic difference between malloc() and calloc() functions:
i) malloc() dynamically allocates memory in bytes. So the programmer specifies how many
bytes of memory malloc should allocate and malloc will allocate that many bytes (if possible)
and return the address of the newly allocated chunk of memory.
Function prototype for malloc():
void *malloc(size_t size);
On the other hand calloc() allocates a chunk of memory specified by a block/element size and
the number of blocks/elements.
Function prototype for calloc():
void *calloc(size_t nelements, size_t elementSize);

ii) malloc() does not initialize memory after it allocates it. It just returns the pointer back to the calling
code and the calling code is responsible for initialization or resetting of the memory, most probably by
using the memset() function. On the other hand calloc() initializes the allocated memory to 0. calloc() is
obviously slower than malloc() since it has the overhead of initialization, so it may not be the best way
to allocate memory if you don't care about initializing the allocated memory to 0.

realloc()
First of all realloc() is actually a reallocation function. It is used to resize a previously allocated (using
malloc(), calloc(), or realloc()) block of memory to the desired size. Depending on whether the new size if
less or more than the original size the block may be moved to new location.
Function Prototype for realloc():
void *realloc(void *pointer, size_t size);

What are the utility of F_GETLK, F_SETLK and F_SETLKW(08)?

F_GETLK: get the first lock which blocks the lock description pointed to by a 3 rd argument, arg, taken as a
pointer to type struct flock, defined in (fentl.h). The information retrieved shall write the information
passed to fcntl() in the structure ‘flock’. If no lock is found that would present this lock being created,
then the structure shall be left unchanged except for the lock type which shall be set to F_UNLCK.
F_SETLK: set or clear a file segment lock according to the lock description pointed to by the thired
argument, arg, taken as a pointer to type struct ‘flock’, design in (fcntl.h). F_SETLK is defined in (fcntl.h).
if a shared or exclusive lock can’t be set, fcntl() shall return immediately with a return value of -1

F_SETLKW: invokes the fcntl callable service to set or release a lock on part of a file and, if another
process has a lock on some or all of the requested range, wait until the specified range is free and the
request can be completed.

What are function of kerenel?

The kernel in Linux handles all operating system processes, such as memory management, task
scheduling, I/O, interprocess communication, and overall system control. This is loaded in two stages - in
the first stage the kernel (as a compressed image file) is loaded into memory and decompressed, and a
few fundamental functions such as basic memory management are set up. Control is then switched one
final time to the main kernel start process. Once the kernel is fully operational – and as part of its
startup, upon being loaded and executing – the kernel looks for an init process to run, which
(separately) sets up a user space and the processes needed for a user environment and ultimate login.
The kernel itself is then allowed to go idle, subject to calls from other processes.
Shell options
Startup options. ksh -options scriptname

-x echo line to stderr before executing it

-n read commands and check for syntax errors, but do not execute.

-a all variables are automatically exported

-f disable wildcard filename expansion (globbing)

set -x Set an option within a shell script

$- contains the currently set option letters

There are many other options, not often needed. Options in ksh and bash can also be
set using long names (e.g. -o noglob instead of -f). Many options are unique to ksh
or bash.

NAMED PIPES (08):- Unix provides for a second type of pipe called named pipe or FIFO. Named
pipes are similar in spirit to unnamed pipes but have additional benefits. When created named pipes
have a directory entry. With the directory entry are file access permissions and the capacity for
unrelated processes to use the pipe file. Although the FIFO has a directory entry, keep in mind the
data written to the FIFO is passed to and stored by the kernel and is
not directly written to the file system.
Named pipe can be created at the shell level (on the command line) or within a program. At
the shell level the command used to make a named pipe is mknod. It is commonly used by the
super user to generate special device files such as block and character device file. From non
privileged users, mknod can only be used to generate a named pipe.
$mkno
d
pipefil
e p
e.g. :-
$mkno
 d
PIPE p
The first argument to the mknod command is the file name for the FIFO. It is common to use an
uppercase file
name to alert the user to the special nature of the file. The second argument is a lower case p , which
notifies mknod that a FIFO file is to be created.
$ ls – l PIPE
Prw_r r 1 MCA USERS 0 oct 20 10:10 PIPE
The lower case letter p at the start of the permission string indicates the file called PIPE is
FIFO .
Under most circumstances, FIFOs are created in a programming environment. The system call
to generate
FIFO in a program has the same name as the command mknod.
Int mknod (chap * path name, int node, int dev)
The pathname is a normal unix pathname, and this is the name of the FIFO. The node
argument specifies the file mode access mode most often the file is created by ORing a symbolic
constant indicating the file type with the file access permissions. The dev argument is ignored in case
of FIFO. The dev argument for mknod is used only when a character or block special file is
specified. If mknod is successful, t retuns a value of 0, otherwise it returns –1

mkfs:
mkfs is used to build a Linux file system on a device, usually a hard disk partition. filesys is
either the device name (e.g. /dev/hda1, /dev/sdb2) or the mount point (e.g. /, /usr,
/home) for the file system. blocks is the number of blocks to be used for the file system.
The exit code returned by mkfs is 0 on success and 1 on failure.
In actuality, mkfs is simply a front-end for the various file system builders (mkfs.fstype)
available under Linux. The file system-specific builder is searched for in a number of
directories like perhaps /sbin, /sbin/fs, /sbin/fs.d, /etc/fs, /etc (the precise list is defined
at compile time but at least contains /sbin and /sbin/fs), and finally in the directories listed
in the PATH environment variable.

Varies options of mkfs

-V Produce verbose output, including all file system-specific commands that are executed.
Specifying this option more than once inhibits execution of any file system-specific commands.
This is really only useful for testing.
-t fstype Specifies the type of file system to be built. If not specified, the default file system type
(currently ext2) is used.
fs-options File system-specific options to be passed to the real file system builder. Although not
guaranteed, the following options are supported by most file system builders.
-c Check the device for bad blocks before building the file system.
-l filename Read the bad blocks list from filename
-v Produce verbose output.
NAT:
In computer networking, network address translation (NAT) is the process of modifying
network address information in datagram (IP) packet headers while in transit across a
traffic routing device for the purpose of remapping one IP address space into another.
Most often today, NAT is used in conjunction with network masquerading (or IP
masquerading) which is a technique that hides an entire IP address space, usually
consisting of private network IP addresses (RFC 1918), behind a single IP address in
another, often public address space. This mechanism is implemented in a routing device
that uses stateful translation tables to map the "hidden" addresses into a single IP address
and readdresses the outgoing Internet Protocol (IP) packets on exit so that they appear to
originate from the router. In the reverse communications path, responses are mapped back
to the originating IP address using the rules ("state") stored in the translation tables. The
translation table rules established in this fashion are flushed after a short period unless
new traffic refreshes their state.

Benefit of NAT:The primary benefit of IP-masquerading NAT is that it has been a practical solution to the
impending exhaustion of IPv4 address space. Even large networks can be connected to the Internet with
as little as a single IP address

How can we change the run level?

During the boot process for Redhat 9.0 and Fedora Core systems the init command opens the
/etc/inittab file to decide what "runlevel" the system should be booted to. The /etc/inittab file is
a plain text file that can be opened with your favorite text editor.
Example:id:3:initdefault:
This tells the init process that the default run level for the system is run level 3. To change to a
different run level simply change the number and save the /etc/inittab file. Before doing this,
however, be absolutely sure you know which run level you want. Selecting the wrong runlevel
can have serious consequences.

OR
If you need to dynamically change the runlevel of linux
For example you can switch into single user mode by running the following command:
telinit S
The administrator could subsequently return to full multi-user, X graphical interface mode either by
entering:
telinit 5
Describe the file structure of unix.

UNIX has a tree-like file system starting at the highest level with a directory
called root (referred to as /). A directory on Unix is similar to a folder on a
microcomputer. The structure and content of many of the directories is similar on
various UNIX implementations. That is, the user does not decide how to set up all
of the directories. There is a preset meaning to certain directories. Directories like
bin, usr and etc contain certain system level information and are maintained by a
system administrator. The figure below displays the uppermost levels of some of
the directories.

The directory you will be most interested in is your home directory and that will
be found somewhere under the /home directory path.