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Unit 1 · Components of computer systems
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Tue 22 Sep 2026 | Course intro & what is a computer? | Welcome, rules, how marks work, the site. What is a computer: input → process → output → storage; a router and a phone are computers. |
| Wed 23 Sep 2026 | Binary: bits, bytes and the ÷8 trap | Bits and bytes, counting in binary, 2⁸ = 256, KB vs KiB, Mbps vs MB/s (the ÷8 trap). |
| Thu 24 Sep 2026 | Information theory & computer architecture | Information theory, Von Neumann. |
| Fri 25 Sep 2026 | Bits in the wild (Practical 1.1) | Practical 1.1: look inside real files — hex dump, magic numbers, text as bytes (ASCII / UTF-8), why a repetitive file compresses and a random one does not. |
| Tue 29 Sep 2026 | CPU, motherboard & memory | Reading a CPU spec sheet (cores, clock, cache), the motherboard and its buses, the memory hierarchy and RAM. |
| Wed 30 Sep 2026 | Storage & booting up | HDD vs SSD, SATA vs NVMe, why a 1 TB disk shows 931 GB; the boot relay from power button to login. |
| Thu 1 Oct 2026 | Peripherals (Practical 1.2) | Input / output / both, connectors and wireless links, drivers, installing and configuring a peripheral. Practical 1.2. |
| Fri 2 Oct 2026 | Read a spec sheet (Practical 1.3) | Practical 1.3: decode three real laptop listings and choose one for three different people on a budget. |
| Tue 6 Oct 2026 | Types of networks | Types of networks and communication systems: PAN/LAN/MAN/WAN, wired vs wireless, topologies, client–server vs peer-to-peer. |
| Wed 7 Oct 2026 | Network components | NIC, cables (UTP categories, fibre), switch, router, access point, ONT/modem; open the classroom rack. |
| Thu 8 Oct 2026 | Network maps | Physical vs logical maps, standard symbols; Practical 1.4: map the classroom network. |
| Fri 9 Oct 2026 | Health and safety | Electrical risk, ESD, ergonomics at a screen, fire, e-waste. |
| Tue 13 Oct 2026 | Review and assessed practical | Recap, then the assessed practical: hardware stations (identify components, read specs, a boot symptom, a network map). |
| Wed 14 Oct 2026 | Exam | Written exam RA1. After it: teaser for Unit 2. |
Unit 2 · Installing operating systems and virtualisation
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 15 Oct 2026 | What is an operating system? | Functional elements of a computer system; what an OS does: processes, memory, files, devices, users. |
| Fri 16 Oct 2026 | Exam feedback & the OS census | Unit 1 exam feedback; census of every OS the students own. |
| Tue 20 Oct 2026 | OS architecture | Kernel, user vs kernel mode, system calls, shell, drivers; monolithic vs microkernel. |
| Wed 21 Oct 2026 | Comparing operating systems | Windows, macOS, Linux distributions, Android/iOS, server and embedded: requirements, features, fields of use. Practical 2.1. |
| Thu 22 Oct 2026 | Software licences | Free software and the four freedoms, open source, proprietary, copyleft vs permissive, OEM/retail/volume. |
| Fri 23 Oct 2026 | Markdown lab reports | How to write a lab report in Markdown: the template used all year. |
| Tue 27 Oct 2026 | Virtualisation | VM, host and guest, hypervisors type 1 and 2, KVM/QEMU, VT-x/AMD-V; check the host. |
| Wed 28 Oct 2026 | Your first virtual machine | Practical 2.2: first VM in virt-manager (vCPU, RAM, qcow2 disk, ISO, NAT), boot a live image. |
| Thu 29 Oct 2026 | Planning an installation | Requirements, compatibility, partition plan, BIOS/UEFI, media. Practical 2.3: the installation plan. |
| Fri 30 Oct 2026 | Verify an ISO, boot media | Checksums (sha256sum), making a bootable USB, boot order. |
| Tue 3 Nov 2026 | Installing Debian | Practical 2.4: install Debian 13 in deb-lab, documenting each decision. |
| Wed 4 Nov 2026 | Ubuntu Server and first steps | Install Ubuntu Server in ubu-srv; first login, sudo, first update; desktop vs server. |
| Thu 5 Nov 2026 | Installing Windows 11 | Practical 2.5: Windows 11 in win11 — requirements (TPM 2.0, Secure Boot), virtio drivers, licences. |
| Fri 6 Nov 2026 | Three installs compared | Debrief: compare the three installs; finish reports. |
| Tue 10 Nov 2026 | Package managers | Apt: repositories, update/upgrade, install, remove, purge, search; .deb; Flatpak/Snap in one table. Practical 2.6. |
| Wed 11 Nov 2026 | Software and updates on Windows | Winget, installers, Microsoft Store, Windows Update; updating Linux; release upgrades. |
| Thu 12 Nov 2026 | Snapshots and recovery | Snapshots; Practical 2.7 "break it, fix it": GRUB recovery mode, Windows Recovery Environment, restore points. |
| Fri 13 Nov 2026 | Proxmox: a first look | Type 1 hypervisor seen live: Proxmox VE web interface, what a datacentre runs. |
| Tue 17 Nov 2026 | Proxmox VE lab | Practical 2.8: install Proxmox VE nested (pve), create a VM and a container from the web UI. |
| Wed 18 Nov 2026 | Review and assessed practical | Recap, then assessed practical: build and document a VM from a written spec. |
| Thu 19 Nov 2026 | Exam | Written exam RA2. |
Unit 3 · Connecting systems in a network
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 20 Nov 2026 | How a message travels | Unit 2 exam feedback (15 min). The OSI and TCP/IP models, encapsulation. |
| Tue 24 Nov 2026 | Ethernet, MAC addresses and switching | Frames, MAC addresses, how a switch learns, ARP; ip link, ip neigh. |
| Wed 25 Nov 2026 | IPv4 addressing | Addresses in binary, masks and CIDR, network / host / broadcast, private ranges. |
| Thu 26 Nov 2026 | Subnetting | Subnetting by hand. Practical 3.1. |
| Fri 27 Nov 2026 | Wireshark: first capture | See a ping in Wireshark, layer by layer. |
| Tue 1 Dec 2026 | Configuring TCP/IP on hosts | Static address, gateway and DNS on Linux and Windows; two VMs on an isolated network. Practical 3.2. |
| Wed 2 Dec 2026 | DHCP and DNS | DHCP (DORA, leases) and DNS (hierarchy, records, dig). |
| Thu 3 Dec 2026 | Meet RouterOS | First contact with a MikroTik: WinBox, WebFig, CLI; reset, identity, users, interfaces. Practical 3.3. |
| Fri 4 Dec 2026 | Cabling a LAN | UTP, T568B, patching and testing; each group cables its LAN. |
| Wed 9 Dec 2026 | Wired LAN with RouterOS | Bridge, address, DHCP server and DNS on RouterOS. Practical 3.4. |
| Thu 10 Dec 2026 | VLANs | Why VLANs, 802.1Q, access and trunk ports, bridge VLAN filtering. Practical 3.5. |
| Fri 11 Dec 2026 | Wireless LAN | 802.11 generations, bands and channels, WPA2/WPA3; configure the access point. Practical 3.6. |
| Tue 15 Dec 2026 | Routing | Routing tables, default gateway, static routes between the groups' networks; traceroute. |
| Wed 16 Dec 2026 | NAT and internet access | NAT and masquerade, IPv4 exhaustion, WAN side of the router, port forwarding. Practical 3.7. |
| Thu 17 Dec 2026 | Ports and firewalls | TCP and UDP, well-known ports, ss; RouterOS firewall filter; a host firewall. Practical 3.8. |
| Fri 18 Dec 2026 | IPv6 in 55 minutes | 128 bits, notation, link-local and global addresses, SLAAC. |
| Tue 22 Dec 2026 | First evaluation close | Last class before Christmas. Track A: recovery tests RA1, RA2 (max mark 5). Track B: a challenge for everyone else. Retrospective. |
| Thu 7 Jan 2027 | Network troubleshooting | First class after the break. A method, bottom-up: ip, ping, traceroute, ss, dig, Wireshark; broken-network stations. Practical 3.9. |
| Fri 8 Jan 2027 | SSH and TLS | Telnet and HTTP read in Wireshark; SSH and TLS/HTTPS. |
| Tue 12 Jan 2027 | VPN with WireGuard | VPNs and WireGuard on RouterOS. Practical 3.10. |
| Wed 13 Jan 2027 | Review and mock practical | Recap and a mock practical: an office network from a written spec. |
| Thu 14 Jan 2027 | Assessed practical | Assessed practical: configure and verify a MikroTik network from a spec. |
| Fri 15 Jan 2027 | Wi-Fi site survey | Survey the school's Wi-Fi channels and choose well. |
| Tue 19 Jan 2027 | Exam | Written exam RA5 (45 min), subnetting included. |
Unit 4 · Information management and storage
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Wed 20 Jan 2027 | Exam feedback & where files live | Unit 3 exam feedback; hook: where is your file, physically? |
| Thu 21 Jan 2027 | Terminal survival & the directory tree | Shell basics (pwd, ls, cd, cat, less, mkdir, cp, mv, rm, paths, Tab) and the FHS; the Windows tree. Practical 4.1 treasure hunt. |
| Fri 22 Jan 2027 | Finding information | Find, grep, locate, wildcards, first pipes; graphical search. Practical 4.2. |
| Tue 26 Jan 2027 | Partitions: MBR & GPT | Disks and partition tables, lsblk, fdisk/parted on a new virtual disk. Practical 4.3. |
| Wed 27 Jan 2027 | File systems | What a file system does; ext4, Btrfs, XFS, NTFS, FAT32, exFAT compared; mkfs. |
| Thu 28 Jan 2027 | Mounting file systems | Mount/umount, UUIDs, /etc/fstab, df and du. Practical 4.4. |
| Fri 29 Jan 2027 | Windows Disk Management | Disk Management and diskpart in win11: volumes and drive letters. |
| Tue 2 Feb 2027 | LVM and RAID | LVM (PV, VG, LV, grow it live); RAID 0/⅕/6/10 and a RAID 1 with mdadm. Practical 4.5. |
| Wed 3 Feb 2027 | Backups | Full / incremental / differential, the 3-2-1 rule, tar and rsync, restoring. Practical 4.6. |
| Thu 4 Feb 2027 | restic and the restore drill | Restic: repository, snapshots, restore, verify; backup on Windows; a restore drill. |
| Fri 5 Feb 2027 | Compression, encryption, integrity | Practical 4.7: tar/gzip/zstd/zip, encrypting a file, checksums. |
| Tue 9 Feb 2027 | First Bash scripts | First Bash scripts: shebang, variables, arguments, if, for, exit codes; write backup.sh. |
| Wed 10 Feb 2027 | Scheduling tasks | Cron, systemd timers, Windows Task Scheduler; schedule backup.sh. Practical 4.8. |
| Thu 11 Feb 2027 | Review and assessed practical | Recap, then assessed practical: new disk → partition → file system → fstab → backup script → schedule. |
| Fri 12 Feb 2027 | RAID is not a backup | Scenario cards: what survives what; a real data-loss story. |
| Tue 16 Feb 2027 | Exam | Written exam RA3 (45 min). |
Unit 5 · Operating system administration
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Wed 17 Feb 2027 | Back to the shell | Bash deeper: redirection, pipes, variables, history, man and --help, globbing. |
| Thu 18 Feb 2027 | Users and groups on Linux | /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, UID/GID, adduser/usermod/groupadd, su and sudo. Practical 5.1. |
| Fri 19 Feb 2027 | PowerShell: first contact | Verb-Noun cmdlets, Get-Help, objects in the pipeline instead of text. |
| Tue 23 Feb 2027 | Bash and PowerShell side by side | Practical 5.2: the same ten tasks in both shells. |
| Wed 24 Feb 2027 | Users and groups on Windows | Local users and groups, Administrators, UAC; GUI, net user, New-LocalUser. |
| Thu 25 Feb 2027 | Account and password policies | Password hashes, ageing (chage), quality and lockout with PAM; Windows account policies; what NIST recommends today. Practical 5.3. |
| Wed 3 Mar 2027 | Linux permissions | Rwx for user/group/others, chmod, chown, umask, what x means on a directory. Practical 5.4. |
| Thu 4 Mar 2027 | Special permissions & ACL | Setuid, setgid, sticky bit; getfacl/setfacl; the shared department folder. |
| Fri 5 Mar 2027 | sudo and least privilege | Sudoers, visudo, the principle of least privilege. |
| Tue 9 Mar 2027 | Processes | Program vs process, PID, ps, top/htop, signals, jobs, priorities; Task Manager, Get-Process. Practical 5.5. |
| Wed 10 Mar 2027 | Services & systemd | Daemons, units, systemctl, writing a small service; Windows services. Practical 5.6. |
| Thu 11 Mar 2027 | Logs & journald | Journalctl, /var/log, Windows Event Viewer; finding what failed and when. |
| Fri 12 Mar 2027 | The case of the failed service | Troubleshooting challenge with status + logs. |
| Tue 16 Mar 2027 | NTFS permissions | NTFS permissions, inheritance, icacls. |
| Wed 17 Mar 2027 | Monitoring performance | CPU, memory, disk and network: load average, free, vmstat, iostat, df; Resource Monitor; find the bottleneck. Practical 5.7. |
| Thu 18 Mar 2027 | Configuring the system by command | Hostname, time, locale, environment variables and PATH, .bashrc and aliases; the Windows equivalents. |
| Fri 19 Mar 2027 | Sysadmin cheat sheet | Each student builds a one-page cheat sheet; retrieval quiz. |
| Tue 23 Mar 2027 | Maintenance and optimisation | Cleaning disks, start-up analysis, TRIM vs defragmentation, sfc/DISM; evaluate utilities. Practical 5.8. |
| Wed 24 Mar 2027 | What a development machine needs | Last class before Easter. What IDEs, SDKs and emulators ask of a system; runtimes, PATH; install a toolchain in deb-lab. Practical 5.9. |
| Tue 6 Apr 2027 | Dependencies and isolated environments | First class after Easter. Dependency conflicts, virtual environments, "works on my machine"; sizing a developer workstation. |
| Wed 7 Apr 2027 | Review: onboarding a new employee | Recap and a mock practical: onboarding a new employee at Tramuntana Apps. |
| Thu 8 Apr 2027 | Assessed practical RA4 | Assessed practical on a VM: users, policy, permissions, a service, logs. |
| Fri 9 Apr 2027 | Exam | Written exam RA4 (45 min). |
| Tue 13 Apr 2027 | Second evaluation close | Track A: recovery tests RA3, RA4, RA5. Track B: challenge. Feedback, retrospective. |
Unit 6 · Network services and resources
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Wed 14 Apr 2027 | Clients, servers & shared resources | Client–server, local vs network resources; the unit project: the Tramuntana office server. |
| Thu 15 Apr 2027 | SSH remote access | SSH with key pairs, ssh-copy-id, ~/.ssh/config, scp, disabling password login. Practical 6.1. |
| Fri 16 Apr 2027 | Remote desktop | RDP and VNC: when a remote desktop beats a shell. |
| Tue 20 Apr 2027 | Samba file server | SMB, installing Samba on ubu-srv, a share, access from Windows and Linux. Practical 6.2. |
| Wed 21 Apr 2027 | Share permissions & groups | Share vs file-system permissions; one folder per department. |
| Thu 22 Apr 2027 | NFS | NFS exports and mounts; SMB vs NFS. Practical 6.3. |
| Fri 23 Apr 2027 | Print server | CUPS: sharing a printer on the network. |
| Tue 27 Apr 2027 | Containers | Containers vs VMs, images and registries, Docker and Podman; first containers. Practical 6.4. |
| Wed 28 Apr 2027 | Images, volumes and ports | Running services: ports, volumes, environment, logs; a first Containerfile. |
| Thu 29 Apr 2027 | Composing services | Compose: an application plus its database. Practical 6.5. |
| Tue 4 May 2027 | User rights and security policies | Rights vs permissions; local security policy on Windows; sudoers and PAM on Linux. |
| Wed 5 May 2027 | Domains and directory services | Workgroup vs domain, directory, LDAP, Kerberos, DNS; Active Directory and Samba AD; create the domain controller. Practical 6.6 part 1. |
| Thu 6 May 2027 | Joining a domain | Join win11 (and a Linux client) to tramuntana.internal; log in with a domain account. |
| Fri 7 May 2027 | Domain users, groups and OUs | Users, groups and organisational units in the domain. |
| Tue 11 May 2027 | Group Policy & domain resources | Group Policy basics; shares for domain groups. Practical 6.6 part 2. |
| Wed 12 May 2027 | Why protect systems | Confidentiality, integrity, availability; threats and real incidents; a hardening checklist. |
| Thu 13 May 2027 | Basic security utilities | Host firewall, antivirus, fail2ban, updates, scanning your own server; install and evaluate. Practical 6.7. |
| Fri 14 May 2027 | Office server project workshop | Project work time with a checklist. |
| Tue 18 May 2027 | Review & mock practical | Recap; finish the project; mock practical. |
| Wed 19 May 2027 | Assessed practical | Assessed practical: a share, a containerised service, remote access and hardening from a spec. |
| Thu 20 May 2027 | Exam | Written exam RA6 (50 min) and project hand-over: the project is documented in Unit 7. |
Unit 7 · Technical documentation and general-purpose tools
| Date | Class | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Fri 21 May 2027 | Software by licence and purpose | Classifying software: free, open source, proprietary, SaaS; system vs application vs development. |
| Tue 25 May 2027 | Software needs in real workplaces | Analysing software needs for different workplaces (studio, school, hotel); cost and selection matrix. Practical 7.1. |
| Wed 26 May 2027 | Git basics | Version control: init, add, commit, status, log, diff, .gitignore. Practical 7.2. |
| Thu 27 May 2027 | Git remotes and collaboration | Remotes, clone, push, pull, branches, merge, pull requests, a conflict on purpose. |
| Fri 28 May 2027 | Finding technical documentation | Man pages, --help, official docs, forums, search operators, judging a source. |
| Tue 1 Jun 2027 | Docs as code | Markdown to PDF with Pandoc and Typst; document the office server. Practical 7.3. |
| Wed 2 Jun 2027 | Office and collaborative tools | Office suites and shared editing; a spreadsheet for inventory and costs. |
| Thu 3 Jun 2027 | Email and messaging | How email works (SMTP, IMAP), configuring a client, writing a professional email, team messaging, spotting phishing. |
| Fri 4 Jun 2027 | File transfer | SFTP, SCP, rsync; why not FTP. Practical 7.4. |
| Tue 8 Jun 2027 | Review and documentation workshop | Recap; finish the documentation repository (the assessed practical of RA7). |
| Wed 9 Jun 2027 | Exam | Written exam RA7 (50 min) and hand-in of the documentation. |
| Thu 10 Jun 2027 | Third evaluation close | Track A: recovery tests RA6, RA7. Track B: challenge. Feedback. |
| Fri 11 Jun 2027 | Marks, feedback and course survey | Marks, individual feedback, course survey, who sits the final recovery. |
| Tue 15 Jun 2027 | Course close | Last class. Track A: final recovery of any pending RA. Track B: draw the whole course on one map, from the bit to the domain. |