Instructor guide

Why we teach this lesson

Timing

Hardware requirements

The requirements are minimal. Everyone just needs their own Linux machine or VM where they have root access via sudo. The machine or VM does not need to be powerful. They should have at leaste

  • 2 cores/vCPUs (1 would be sufficient, but painful)

  • 4 GiB of RAM (2 GiB might be sufficient, but painful)

  • 4 GiB of extra disk space

Preparing exercises

Many people don’t have a Linux machine where they have root access and don’t yet have a VM setup. In this situation, the best path is for them to use a Linux VM. There are two ways this can be done

  1. Setup VMs for the learners who need them in bulk.

  2. Guide them to setup VMs on their own and then have a troubleshooting session to help the ones who get stuck.

This applies for yourself as well.

Other practical aspects

Interesting questions you might get

Typical pitfalls

  • Learners don’t actually have the prerequisite knowledge will struggle through pretty much everything. It is best to refer them to other modules, courses, trainings, and resources to learn those.

  • If the learners were supposed to setup a working VM before hand, many will not till the actual teaching session itself. It is important to have a troubleshooting session before hand and emphasize that those who do not have a setup ready to go by the session itself will not be able to get help at the beginning of the session (it was their responsibility to prepare and attend the troubleshooting session if they were having problems). Yes, everyone has busy schedules but you will need to stand your ground on this or helping them will take the entire session at the expense of the learners who came prepared.

  • It is easy to unwittingly get into deep nested unshares and things not work right because of it. Remind learners to until they get back to the top-level and start again. If ps aux shows a lot of processes from other users and/or ps shows a long list of processes, then they are still nested.