The details:
- You can try this at home, with our home study program.
If you join ArsDigita after completing
it, you'll earn a $10,000 signing bonus.
- You can try this at home connecting to our server via our ongoing
remote boot camp: We will provide an account on one of our
Oracle-backed machines and guide you through our problem sets. Most of
the work will be done remotely, but we can schedule a time for you to
visit and work with us for a few days.
- To check the schedule and apply, visit http://arsdigita.com/events/.
Visit ArsDigita for more information
about the company, boot camps, and jobs.
Background: This material is generally taught to computer science
seniors at MIT. You should have at least some programming background
before attempting the boot camp. It is also helpful to have some
mechanical skills (driving a Unix machine, editing files in Emacs; you
can get these by installing Linux on a PC and playing around).
Objectives
We want to teach programmers the Web/db and community service development
skills that they'd get from the problem sets in
our one-semester course at MIT, plus the following:
- enough about Unix that they don't impose too great a load on the
professional sysadmins
- enough about Oracle that they don't impose too great a load on the
professional database administrators
- (in the glorious long version)
enough about our server architecture and procedures that they can keep a
service up and running 24x7
Hidden agenda: At least a few folks from each boot camp seem to end up
working at arsdigita.com or one of its customers.
Gross Schedule
Our boot camp comes in three incarnations:
- short: three weeks; three problem sets on development systems
that are set up in advance by professionals (i.e., the students don't
learn about Unix and Oracle installation)
- medium: five weeks; setting up a development system and then doing
three problem sets
- long: twelve weeks
Here is the gross outline of the long schedule:
- Week 1: Unix sysadmin. Install Solaris on a bare Ultra 5.
- Week 2: Oracle dba. Install Oracle 8i on the Ultra 5.
- Week 3: Problem set 1 from 6.916: learning the tools and Web
fundamentals.
- Week 4: Problem set 2 from 6.916: getting familiar with the ACS
(our toolkit). Billing credit cards.
- Week 5: Problem set 3 from 6.916: understanding content
management.
- Week 6: A new problem set designed to teach students about online
community extensions.
- Week 7: A new problem set entirely about ecommerce (touched on in
Week 4).
- Week 8: ArsDigita Server Architecture and troubleshooting down Web
services.
- Weeks 9-12: building a site for a real client (e.g., a non-profit
group).
For the short version, we do only Weeks 3 and 4. For the medium
version, we do Weeks 1 through 5.
Textbooks
For short course:
For the medium and long courses, add the following:
- red book and Essential Sysadmin; http://docs.sun.com has answerbook
online (very very slow, though). Good chunk of the stuff is available
in .html and we can put it up.
- Unix
Power Tools (Peek 1997; O'Reilly)
- Oracle DBA Handbook (Loney 1998; Osborne McGraw-Hill).
Week 1
- install Solaris right up through CDE
- install Netscape either from CD-ROM or from FTP
- 1 hour: adding and removing accounts (useradd, usermod; also show
AdminTool)
- install pre-built gcc
- build fresh gcc
- build GNU Emacs 20.x
- install pre-built tclsh 7.4
- install pre-built bash, tcsh, zsh
- install pre-built Perl
- build ssh
- build ImageMagick and then add JPEG, PNG, TIFF libraries
- install AOLserver
- install restart-aolserver (*** Scott is going to look at this to see
if we need setuid Perl)
- build qmail configure and restart machine to make sure it comes back
with qmail up
- install keepalive
- install rollover (to roll error log)
- install watchdog
- mirror disks
- backups: (1) create a tar backup to disk of just the .tcl files in a
/web dir, then restore one file, (2) create a UFSDUMP of a partition to
a Unix file, (3) restore one file from that UFSDUMP
- security: what to worry about, scripts to help deal with
Detailed schedule: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/bootcamp/week1/week1.html
Note:
Scott Blomquist is available Monday, Tuesday, and Friday afternoons.
Weekend
Over the weekend, students prepare by reading the following:
Based on this reading, each student prepares a presentation for the
entire class, using either http://wimpy.arsdigita.com
or notecards/whiteboard. The presentation should cover the following
topics:
- the basic structure of Oracle
- how Oracle looks to Unix: N processes and what each one does
- how to order disk drives to support Oracle and then how to use them
- how a table is stored in Oracle: segments and extents
- what the rollback segment is and how it is used
- users, roles, and permissions
- preparing for the worst: backup strategies
- steps to making sure that you can do online backups
We will pick students at random to present each one of these topics.
The other students will be responsible for criticizing. Oracle's
structure is so complex that the only way you can possible learn it is
by preparing to teach it to others.
Week 2
Day 1 (morning): initiate scp of Oracle installation CD-ROM to each machine,
attend presentations on Oracle structure
Day 1 (afternoon): install Oracle 8i with Intermedia and SQL*Net,
create a user called "web" in its own "web" tablespace (with one
datafile called "web.dbf"). Tweak the Oracle installation until the
acceptance tests in
http://www.photo.net/wtr/oracle-tips.html
will run.
Day 1 (at home): read chapters 13 and 14 of Oracle8 DBA Handbook
Day 2 (morning):
- reboot machine; make sure that Oracle shuts down automatically and
starts up automatically; check Oracle error log to verify clean startup
- create a new user, "mrgreed", with the Solaris shell command
useradd
- log out and log back in as "mrgreed" and make sure that "sqlplus" is
in this user's path and that this user can successfully connect to
Oracle upon typing the web username and password; if not, fix the
machine config, drop the mrgreed user and start over from the "useradd"
command.
Day 2 (afternoon):
- create a new Oracle user called "mrgreed" whose data goes into the
USERS tablespace
- create a tab-separated file in Emacs containing five lines, each
line to contain your favorite stock symbol, an integer number of shares
owned, and a date acquired (in the form MM/DD/YYYY)
- create an Oracle table, owned by the mrgreed user, to hold these
data:
create table my_stocks (
symbol varchar(20) not null,
n_shares integer not null,
date_acquired date not null
);
- use the
sqlload
shell command to invoke SQL*Loader to
slurp up your tab-separated file into the my_stocks
table
(see page 1183 of Oracle8: The Complete Reference and
the official Oracle docs at http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/utilities)
- with the help of the Oracle Net8 Administrator's Guide
at http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/net8,
configure your server to talk to another student's and vice versa
- using the SQL*Plus copy command, documented on page 533 of Oracle8:
The Complete Reference and at
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/copycommand,
copy the my_stocks table from your fellow student's server into a
table named "stupid_stock_picks" on your own machine
- Use an SQL INTERSECT command to print a list of stocks that both of
you picked
Day 3 (morning):
- create a table called "foobar" owned by your "web" user and fill it
with a few rows of data
- start two SQL*Plus sessions, both connected as the mrgreed user to
your local database
- type "delete from my_stocks;" in one session
- type "select * from my_stocks;" in both sessions
- type "rollback;" in the first session
- in a separate Unix shell, using the
exp
command, invoke the Oracle Export
utility, documented at
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/export, to create
two consistent export files, one for the entire database
(entire-db.dmp) and
one for just those objects owned by the mrgreed user (mrgreed.dmp)
- type "delete from my_stocks where symbol = '**one of your symbols**';"
and then "commit;"
- type "select * from my_stocks;" in both sessions
- start third SQL*Plus session, connected as the web user, and
type "drop table foobar;"
- use the Oracle Import utility, documented at
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/import, to
recover the lost row from the
my_stocks
table using the
mrgreed.dmp file and the dropped foobar table using the entire-db.dmp
file.
Day 3 (afternoon): get Intermedia text search to work
Day 4 (morning, afternoon):
- develop a set of scripts to do online backups with archived redo
logs that are point-in-time recoverable
- create a table owned by your web user:
create table frequently_updated (
time_of_update date not null,
freespace_for_web integer not null
);
- create a PL/SQL procedure,
record_freespace
that will (1) query the
blocks
column in the dba_free_space
view to
figure out how many free blocks are in the Web user's data file (you
might have to connect as dba and grant select
on this view
to the web user; (2) insert a row into frequently_updated
;
(3) commit the update.
- set up your Oracle instance to have one SNP background processes
(see http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/ref/jobs), with a
job queue interval of 10 seconds
- restart Oracle
- schedule a DBMS Job to run
record_freespace
every 30 seconds
- verify that
record_freespace
is growing by one row
every 30 seconds
- make an online backup of your database (i.e., while
record_freespace
is being filled)
- run dbverify on the backup files that you've created
- recover the database to any point in time during the middle of that
online backup and verify that
record_freespace
in fact
contains entries right up to the recovered time and none after.
Day 5 (morning): Tuning. Make sure that the web user can run "set
autotrace on". Require use of analyze table compute
statistics
.
Day 5 (afternoon): deadlocks, integrity constraint violations (finding
and dropping integrity constraints),
Helpful: Chapter 32 of Oracle8: The Complete Reference
Day 5 (late afternoon): compile AOLserver Oracle driver and connect
your AOLserver to Oracle as the web user
Weekend
Students prepare by reading the following:
- Philip and Alex's Guide to
Web Publishing, Chapters 1, 4, 5, 10, 11
- Practical
Programming in Tcl and Tk (remember that we only use Tcl, not Tk, so
limit yourself to chapters 1-11 and 13; remember also that this book is
about Tcl 8 and AOLserver has Tcl 7.4 compiled in, so you can't use the
clock
command or event loops or some other things).
- SQL for Web Nerds, chapters 1-5, 8
Week 3
On each day this week, we observe the following schedule:
Monday morning lecture: Overview of languages and resources
Monday evening reading: short course students should read all the stuff
that longer course students were supposed to read last weekend
Tuesday morning and afternoon lectures: Common errors will be user to further introduce the programming environment.
Wednesday morning lecture: Structured approach to building SQL queries
Wednesday evening reading:
Reading from Visual Explanations:
- Space Shuttle Challenger example: Pages 38-53
- Smallest effective difference: Page 74
- Multiples in Space and Time: Pages 105-119, esp. the Tufte medical
chart on p. 111
- Everything important about Web design: Pages 146-196
Friday: Full day lecture at MIT
Week 4
Activity: Doing Problem Set 2.
Week 5
Activity: Doing Problem Set 3.
Doing a short boot camp on-site somewhere
For the short boot camp, the key is to get facilities ready beforehand.
For lectures, we simply need a room large enough to hold all of the
students, a good Internet connection, a Web browser, and a high-quality
video projector so that all the students can see what is on the Web
browser. For problem set work, the students need a big room or open
cubicle area so that one TA can cover 10 students. Each student must
have a computer with an ssh client and an X server (i.e., any Unix
machine with appropriate software installed or a Windows machine
with Hummingbird Exceed and fsecure SSH).
Week -2: professional system administrators configure student
development machines with the Unix operating system and Oracle8i.
There should be one development machine for every 8 students. This is
partly to work around a bug in Oracle 8.1.5 (won't run on a machine with
more than 10 IP addresses). Once the basic stuff in the LCS computing
facility document is set up, you need to
- get 10 IP addresses per machine
- define a bunch of hostnames like "st01.yourorg.com" through
"st40.yourorg.com"
- config each Unix box to listen on either 9 or all 10 (depending on
whether Oracle will start) of the allocated IP addresses
- create 10 Unix shell accounts on each machine, named "st01"
through "st10", "st11" through "st20", etc.
- create 10 Oracle tablespaces on each machine, each named "stN"
with one 40 MB autoextending data file "stN.dbf"
create tablespace st13 datafile '/opt/oracle/u02/oradata/ora8/st13.dbf' size 40m autoextend on;
- create 10 Oracle users on each machine, each named "st01" up...
create user st13 identified by st13
default tablespace st13
quota unlimited on st13;
- grant permissions to all the Oracle users:
grant connect, resource to st13;
- test:
- Log in as st13
- type "sqlplus st13/st13"
- type "create table foobar (yow integer);"
- type "drop table foobar;"
- create 10 Web server roots, one for each student:
/web/stN/www/ and /web/stN/tcl/ (/web is typically a symlink
over to /home)
- create 10 AOLserver .ini files, stN.ini, each one binding to
only the IP address and hostname corresponding to that student's host
and connecting to Oracle as the right user. Each one should have its
page root at /web/stN/www and its private Tcl directory at
/web/stN/tcl/
- make 10 entries in /etc/inittab so that these servers start
automatically
- test "restart-aolserver st13" (script available from
http://arsdigita.com/free-tools/)
Week -2: boot camp sponsor orders textbooks and prints Web-based
materials.
Week -2: boot camp sponsor verifies that ssh connections can be made
through their firewall to baden.ai.mit.edu, trying to log in as "foo"
password "bar" and getting "login incorrect".
philg@mit.edu