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CST 8207 Course Home Page

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Fall (SeptemberDecember) 2017

Instructor
Ian! D. Allen, BA (Psychology), MMath (Computer Science)
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Important Dates for CST8207 Students

The Fall Term resumes on Tuesday November 21 using your regular Tuesday weekly class schedule, except as noted below, and is extended to Thursday, January 11, 2018. The Winter Term begins on Tuesday January 16, 2018.

In addition to your regular weeks of classes, classes will also be held December 11-15, 18-22 and January 2-5 2018. All 13 weeks of the new Fall Term are class teaching weeks using your standard weekly class schedules; the Final Assessment week is cancelled.

Your CST8207 Final Exam will take place in your usual two-hour lecture periods in Week 13 on Monday January 8 (Section 010 and 030) or Tuesday January 9 2018 (Section 030).

The CST8207 lecture section 020 on Tuesday November 21 is cancelled because the matching lectures for sections 010 and 030 on Monday are cancelled.
The CST8207 lecture section 020 on Tuesday January 2 is cancelled because the matching lectures for sections 010 and 030 on Monday are cancelled.
The CST8207 lecture section 020 on Thursday January 11 is cancelled because the matching lectures for sections 010 and 030 on Friday are cancelled.

This is the Fall Term class schedule dictated to faculty by management. Unlike other schools such as Carleton, Algonquin College does not allocate replacement days to compensate for classes missed due to holidays.

Because management cancelled the 010 and 030 section classes, I had to cancel the corresponding section 020 class to keep the three sections synchronized and so that everyone has fair and equal class time. I can't have people from the 010 and 030 sections rightly arguing that the section 020 people have an unfair class advantage.

Section 020 people will have exactly the same class time as the other sections.

We faculty have no control over academic matters such as class scheduling. We can't control what courses are offered, how they are delivered, or to how many students; all that is controlled and decided by management. Academic Freedom - the ability to have a say in the quality of your education - is one of the reasons we went out on strike.

In place of your Tuesday lecture on November 21 and January 2, you may attend the Tuesday lab period 4pm-6pm in T230 for extra help.

* Bonus Assignment 4 has a new due date in Week 10.
* Bonus Assignment 6 has a new due date in Week 9.
* Assignment 7 has a new due date in Week 8.

Due to the shortened school term, CST8207 Fall 2017 won't be able to cover Vocational Learning Outcome #6 (Use a variety of scripting tools and languages to automate routine tasks) or Course Learning Requirement #8 (Automate tasks using scripting). Scripting will be moved to the second-term course CST8177 for Winter 2018.

2017-09-06 – Week 1 – Wednesday September 6 – classes start. See your timetable, available online on the College ACSIS system. Bring your laptop or mobile device to your first class and to all your classes.
2017-10-05/06 – Week 5 – Thursday October 5 or Friday October 6 – Midterm #1 of 2 (45 minutes – 10%) in your one-hour lecture class
2017-10-09 – Week 6 – Monday October 9 – Thanksgiving Day (College closed)
2017-10-16 – Week 7 – Monday October 16 – Province-wide strike by College faculty
2017-11-20 – Week 7 – Monday November 20 – College faculty are forced back to work by provincial legislation
2017-11-21 – Week 7 – Tuesday November 21 – students return to class (Tuesday schedule, but no section 020 lecture class today)
2017-12-07/08 – Week 9 – Thursday December 7 or Friday December 8 – Midterm #2 of 2 (45 minutes – 15%) in your one-hour lecture class
2017-12-15 – Week 10 – Friday December 15 – Last Withdrawal Date
2018-01-08/09 – Week 13 – Monday January 8 or Tuesday January 9 2018 – Final exam (110 minutes – 40%) in your two-hour lecture class
2018-01-11 – Week 13 – Thursday January 11 2018 – end of Fall Term 2017; last day of classes
2018-01-16 – Week 1 – Tuesday January 16 – start of Winter Term 2018 and CST8207 Winter 2018

See also the "Academic Calendar" on the Algonquin Registrar Office Page.

Course Description

Consult the Course Outline (PDF) for the official description.

Students learn the basic concepts and features of the GNU/Linux operating system and utilities, the world's most well-known Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) project and the underlying technology supporting Google, Facebook and Android smart phones. Students examine the power of the GNU/Linux command line and the basics of shell scripting and task automation are studied. Students perform file system searches, full-text searches, and data-mine system log files to generate analyses of network attacks and intrusion attempts. Students also customize their shell programming environment to simplify repetitive tasks and support system administration functions.

Alternate Web Notes

EFF Membership Badge for Ian! D. Allen

Web notes for this course are kept at multiple sites. I pay for the notes to be stored on commercial Linux-based web hosting services, with backup copies located in various locations.

Write down the locations of the web notes and their backup copies from the list below. (You won't be able to get to this page if the main web site is down!)

  1. http://teaching.idallen.com/cst8207/17f/    (main .com site)
    The main dot .com site is located in a large data centre in Troy, Michigan, USA.
  2. http://teaching.idallen.org/cst8207/17f/    (note the dot .org domain suffix!)
    The .org site is located in a large data centre in New York.
  3. http://cst8207.idallen.ca/~idallen/teaching/cst8207/17f/     (on campus)
    The CST8207 site is accessible from inside Algonquin College even when the College Internet is broken.
  4. http://elearning.algonquincollege.com/coursemat/alleni/idallen/cst8207/17f/     (on campus)
    The ELEARNING site is accessible from inside Algonquin College even when the College Internet is broken. Unfortunately, the web server on ELEARNING is not configured correctly to run CGI scripts and it will not serve up the directory index files correctly. (See this note.) You can read the Class Notes by appending /notes/ to the above URL.

Ottawa/Gatineau Linux Resources

A System Administrator – XKCD

Sysadmin devotion to duty

Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants. Programming Sucks

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) – Infrastructures

I support free software Free Software, Free Society Powered by GNU Powered by GNU

Electronic Frontier Foundation