Assignment: Automate System Administration

Learning outcome 1: Use appropriate programming or scripting constructs in order to develop functional software to a specification
Learning outcome 2: Automate system administration tasks using a scripting language

Outline
For this task you will need to write a series of scripts to perform system administration tasks on both Linux and Windows computers. Your scripts must be written using bash for Linux and PowerShell for Windows. These scripts will build on the tasks we do in lab time. It is important that you upload your lab scripts in lesson time for feedback and as a demonstration of your ideas before final hand-in.

Task 1. Creating Users

You will be supplied with a comma separated variable (csv) file containing the information on a number of user accounts to be created. Each line of the file will contain data such as:

First Name, Last Name, Username, Password, Department The format of the data in the CSV file may vary and you will need to be adaptable. Get your questions answered now!

The Windows version of the create user script should take the name of the csv file as a command line argument and create the users on an active directory domain controller. You should obtain the domain controller details from the user of the script rather than hard code it.

The Linux version of the activity should create users on the local host only.

Task 2 - Health Check

The second task is to create a script to monitor various health status indicators on remote computers. Again, your script should be written both in PowerShell and Bash to target Windows and Linux respectively. Your script should offer a text-based menu offering at least five different metrics to be measures. This could include:

• Uptime
• Free Disk Space
• Free Memory
• CPU Usage
• Active Users

You are free to choose your own metrics for this task. After displaying the result, the script should return to the menu. The script should continue to run until the user chooses to exit. Each script should be able to accept the name of the target system to query as a command line argument. If no argument is supplied the script should prompt the user for one.

Use Harvard referencing.