About the Class

This course introduces the basic operations in major Linux distros for cybersecurity using both graphical interface and command line interface. Students will learn about the basic installation and configuration, file systems management, shell scripts, and user authentication in Linux systems. This course is the technical base for students to take cybersecurity major courses.

My Experiences

This course stood out to me, because it was one of the first classes where we get our hands “dirty” for the first time, at least for me. This class introduced me to VMs, I had heard of them before, but never had used one, same thing with Linux I have never used another operating system before on a computer, not even a Mac OS. I had a lot to learn this class, and the experience through the labs we great and straight forward. This class also introduced me to Regex which was a daunting task at first and still can be confusing, but very useful.

Skills and Takeaways.

The command line analysis skills I have learned from this, just based on the core concepts of command lines and command prompt navigation. I took my coding skills learned from Virginia Tech, to help me design my very basic scripts for this class. This class introduced libraries and how to install and use them on VMs through through the command line interface.

Basic Script for Username Restrictions

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter your input string with some character and number:"
read mi
#gets the length of the provided input
lenMi=$(echo -n $mi | wc -m)

#checks if input contains only lowercase and digits.
check=$(echo -n $mi | grep -c [^[:lower:][:digit:]])

#checks the values found above and determine if it fits criteria
if [ "$lenMi" -ge "4" && [ "$lenMi" -le "8" ]
then
    if [ "$chec"k" -ge "1" ]
    then
        echo "Try again"
    else
        echo "Thank you! Your MiDAS ID is: $mi"
    fi
else
        echo "Too short or too long!"
fi