OPS445

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OPS445 Assignment 1
OPS445 Assignment 2

Welcome to OPS445 - Python Programming

What This Course is About This course is an introduction to programming in general, and Python programming specifically. You have written snippets of code before, but in this course you'll be taught how to think like a programmer, not just copy-paste from Chat GPT into a school submission form. This course is the fourth in a series of courses covering Linux technologies: OPS145 taught you to be a Linux user. OPS245 taught you to move from being a Linux user to being a Linux system administrator. OPS345 taught you to administer Linux servers (web servers, email servers, firewalls), as well as use cloud-provided services for DNS, databases, and file storage systems. OPS445 will teach you how you can automate an infinite number of tasks, increasing your value as a system administrator dramatically. As a system administrator, you will be responsible for installing, configuring, adjusting, maintaining, and troubleshooting the operation of Linux network services. You will potentially have several hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of people depending on the machines that you manage. This is a lot of responsibility, and with that responsibility comes power. You will be able to change anything on the system, and you will also have the ability to damage or destroy the system. Depending on how the course is delivered in your semester: you will need either a workstation computer powerful enough to run Linux Mint (either natively or as a VMWare Workstation virtual machine), or a USB SSD drive to store your virtual machine which you will run on a lab computer at Seneca. Learning by Doing Most of the learning in this course occurs through the hands-on problem solving that takes place in the labs and assignments. Therefore, it's very important to stay up-to-date with the coursework, and to practice until you have confidently mastered each task. All of the software used in this course is open source software, so you are free to use, modify, and redistribute it. This means that you can install it as many times as you want on as many different computers as you would like. It also means that you can tinker with it -- you can take it apart, see how it works, and put it back together in the same or a different way, limited only by your time and ambition. You are encouraged to experiment and question liberally. Course Faculty During the winter 2025 semester OPS345 is taught by:

Required Materials Workstation Computer Powerful enough Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition DVD Image USB3 Solid State Drive (SSD) Minimum Capacity: 50 GB

Andrew Smith Sections A and B andrew.smith@senecapolytechnic.ca

If you're not from Seneca

You're welcome to use these materials for learning anyway. You won't get any course credit, and I won't be marking your stuff, but I (Andrew) might reply to your questions if you email me.