Administrator Course

Lesson 1 • Documentation and Change Logging

Establishes habits for recording configurations, changes, and incidents. Directly reduces mean time to recovery and supports audit readiness.

Lesson 2 • Operating System Fundamentals

Covers file systems, process management, and kernel interactions across major OS families. Enables confident navigation of any server environment.

Lesson 3 • Command-Line Proficiency Basics

Builds essential shell navigation, file manipulation, and output redirection skills. Underpins all scripting and automation work in later chapters.

Lesson 4 • Infrastructure Components Overview

Maps hardware, software, network, and storage layers as an integrated system. Provides vocabulary for diagnosing and communicating issues across teams.

Lesson 1 • Account Lifecycle Management

Covers provisioning, modification, suspension, and deprovisioning of accounts. Connects identity hygiene to security posture established in Chapter 1.

Lesson 2 • Directory Services Administration

Introduces centralised directory concepts, schema, and replication. Provides the backbone for enterprise-wide identity management.

Lesson 3 • Groups and Permission Models

Explains group-based access control, nested groups, and permission inheritance. Enables scalable access management without per-user configuration.

Lesson 4 • Privileged Access Management

Addresses elevation models, just-in-time access, and privileged account auditing. Reduces attack surface from over-privileged administrative accounts.

Lesson 1 • DNS and DHCP Administration

Covers zone management, record types, lease configuration, and failover. Ensures name resolution and address assignment remain reliable and auditable.

Lesson 2 • IP Addressing and Subnetting

Teaches IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, CIDR notation, and subnet design. Provides the mathematical foundation for all network configuration tasks.

Lesson 3 • VPN and Remote Access Services

Covers site-to-site and client VPN setup, tunnelling protocols, and split tunnelling. Supports secure remote workforce connectivity requirements.

Lesson 4 • Firewall and Access Control Lists

Explains stateful inspection, rule ordering, and ACL design principles. Enables administrators to enforce network segmentation and traffic policies.

Lesson 1 • File Sharing and Permissions

Addresses share creation, access control lists, and cross-platform compatibility. Ensures data is accessible to authorised users and protected from others.

Lesson 2 • RAID Configurations and Trade-offs

Explains RAID levels, rebuild processes, and performance implications. Enables informed decisions about redundancy vs. capacity trade-offs.

Lesson 3 • Disk Partitioning and Volume Management

Teaches partition schemes, logical volume creation, and resizing operations. Provides hands-on control over how storage is allocated to workloads.

Lesson 4 • Backup Strategies and Recovery Testing

Defines backup types, retention policies, and recovery time objectives. Validates that backup investments translate into actual recoverability.

Lesson 1 • Scheduling and Automation Pipelines

Covers task schedulers, dependency chaining, and failure handling in pipelines. Ensures automated jobs run reliably without manual intervention.

Lesson 2 • Core Scripting Constructs

Covers variables, conditionals, loops, and functions as reusable building blocks. Enables construction of logic-driven automation beyond simple command sequences.

Lesson 3 • Scripting Language Selection and Setup

Compares scripting languages by use case, ecosystem, and administrative fit. Establishes a productive development environment for automation work.

Lesson 4 • System Interaction via Scripts

Teaches file I/O, process spawning, and API calls from scripts. Connects scripting skills to real administrative tasks like log parsing and service control.

Lesson 1 • Baseline Security Configuration

Establishes secure defaults for OS, services, and accounts using hardening benchmarks. Reduces attack surface before any workload is deployed.

Lesson 2 • Audit Logging and SIEM Integration

Configures system audit logs, forwarding pipelines, and correlation rules. Provides the visibility needed to detect and investigate security events.

Lesson 3 • Compliance Frameworks and Audits

Maps administrative controls to common regulatory and industry frameworks. Prepares administrators to support internal and external audit processes.

Lesson 4 • Patch Management Lifecycle

Covers vulnerability scanning, patch prioritisation, testing, and deployment cadence. Keeps systems current without introducing instability.

Lesson 1 • Hypervisor Architecture and Management

Explains Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors, resource allocation, and VM lifecycle. Provides the foundation for managing virtualised server environments.

Lesson 2 • Cloud Cost and Resource Governance

Covers tagging strategies, budget alerts, and rightsizing recommendations. Prevents cloud sprawl and aligns resource consumption with business budgets.

Lesson 3 • Virtual Networking and Storage

Covers virtual switches, VLANs, and virtual disk management within hypervisors. Mirrors physical network and storage skills in a virtualised context.

Lesson 4 • Cloud Platform Fundamentals

Introduces cloud service models, shared responsibility, and core compute services. Orients administrators to cloud-native operational patterns.

Lesson 1 • Observability and Monitoring Architecture

Covers metrics, logs, and traces as the three pillars of observability. Builds a monitoring stack that provides actionable visibility into system health.

Lesson 2 • Post-Incident Review and Learning

Structures blameless post-mortems, action item tracking, and knowledge sharing. Converts incidents into organisational learning that prevents recurrence.

Lesson 3 • Incident Response Lifecycle

Walks through detection, triage, containment, eradication, and recovery phases. Provides a repeatable process that minimises impact duration and data loss.

Lesson 4 • Alerting and On-Call Management

Defines alert severity levels, escalation paths, and on-call rotation design. Reduces alert fatigue while ensuring critical issues reach the right responder.