MN404 Fundamentals Of Operating Systems And Programming : Solution Essays

Question:

This assignment assesses the following Unit Learning Outcomes; students should be able to demonstrate their achievements in them.

a.Describe the role of Operating Systems (OS) and its different subsystems in controlling computer hardware

b.Demonstrate competency in the use of a command line interface to operate and perform simple OS administration

I.The Operating system acts as an interface between the user and the computer hardware. Compare and contrast the Unix OS with Window OS in terms of the following:
 
Stability
Performance
Compatibility
Reliability

Justify your statements with suitable examples and references.

a.Is Open Source OS really more secure?Justify your answer

b.In a multiprogramming and time-sharing environment, several users share the system simultaneously. This situation can result in various security problems.

c. What are two such problems?


d. Can we ensure the same degree of security in a time-shared machine as we have in a dedicated machine? Explain your answer.

c.What is the purpose of having a kernel and What is the least functionality a kernel has to provide usually (Hint: Usually a minimal kernel provides three properties)?

Where does the rest of the system reside and how does the rest of the system interact with the kernel?   

 

Answer:

Introduction:

Unix OS is more stable compared to windows OS. Unix OS is the most scalable and reliable OS because it usually is tightly integrated with the hardware. The massive UNIX vendors have the advantage of coming up with their various OS versions around their hardware that permits them to possess hardware with less incompatibilities and problems than Windows OS. [1]

Performance

Unix OS run faster in desktop than Windows OS. This feature of Linux makes it more suitable software development environment. Developer find it easier to use Linux than windows since most of development tools are provided by default. [2] Also Unix OS are known to have better hosting environment compared to windows OS.

Compatibility

Almost all application tends to be designed to run in windows OS. Although there are alternatives Unix applications in the market for windows, some don’t have alternatives.  This makes it important to ask yourself if there exist an alternative to the application you are using in windows before you migrate to Unix OS.

If there doesn’t exist an alternative for Unix, one can use some software such as WINE or VM to run windows applications in Unix OS. [3]

Installing applications in Unix is usually done by typing the correct commands in the terminal. One can install the application from the repository while other need to be downloaded and installed directly the source. Windows OS users aren’t affected by these incompatible issues since installing applications in windows is much simply compared to Unix. [3]

Reliability

Unix OS is additional reliable in comparison to Windows. Unix OS has a reliable in build security measures. Developers of Unix versions are much active and unleash major and minor updates time to time. Historically systems that run in Unix OS are well-known for running for many years without failures or need to restart. UNIX operating system OS is additional reliable in terms of security than window OS. Hackers or virus developers realize it harder to penetrate through Linux as compared to window OS that is more prone to viruses and malware without ant-virus program. Once a programme hang in windows, typically it’s troublesome to kill the programme even through task manager. In Linux, any application can be terminated with the XKill command. [4]

 

Short Answer Questions

  1. Open source code OS is a software system whose source code is freely out there for users. Open source OS is taken into account safer compared with closed source OS. OS like UNIX is an open source OS. Since everybody has access to the codes, bugs and week points of OS are found faster and so they are fixed faster, closing up security holes quicker. In addition, anyone and everybody are free to produce a higher, safer version of the package. [4]
  2. In multiprogramming and Time sharing there are problems such as:
  3. There is stealing of personal files or other data.
  4. Resources e.g. main memory and other hardware devices are used without proper management.
  5. It is impossible to make sure the identical degree of security in time-shared machine as we’ve got in dedicated machine since any security scheme designed  by humans can be broken by a human, and therefore the more complicated the scheme, the harder it’s to feel assured of its correct implementation.
  6. Kernel is a software that provides save multiplexing to underlying hardware. Kernel has to provide at least the following three functionality;

Message passing.

  1. They reside in libraries and applications (user space).  User space interacts through system calls with kernel. System call is an entry point to kernel [4][.

OS Administration using Command Line Interface (CLI)

Security related commands 

  • Create a file in your home directory; name it with your MITID?

We use the ‘touch’ command to create a file. The syntax is touch <filename>.

  • What is the default file permissions assigned to the newly created file?

The default permissions as seen below for the file, MIT182523, is read-write (rw) for owner (user), read(r) for group, and r for other users.

  • Change the default permissions to group, read & write access and verify the same.

The command ‘chmod’ is used to change mode where the permissions to be set are given as read, write, and execute. Here, we set read and write to the file MIT182523.

  • Create a directory with your name and store the file with your id in it.

The syntax is: mkdir <folder name>. In my case I create directory called Sai-Kumar.

We move the file MIT182523 to our Sai-Kumar directory using the move command: ‘mv <file> <path to folder>.’

  • Checks the default settings of the directory created and change them all with RWX permissions and verify the same.

The command ‘chmod 777’ sets RWX (read, write, and execute) permissions for owner, group, and others.

  • Reset the user password

The user in my case is root. This picture shows change of root password.

The syntax: passwd <username> as shown in the screenshot below.

UNIX networking Commands.

  • Ping

This uses the ICMP protocol’s obligatory ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit associate degree ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from a number or entree. ECHO_REQUEST datagrams have associate degree ICMP and IP header, followed by a struct time Val so associate degree absolute variety of pad bytes won’t to fill out the packet [5]. Here, we ping www.google.com:

The image above shows the number of packets transmitted, time taken, packets received back, and packet loss stats. As shown, there were 4 packets transmitted and none lost in that duration of time 3003ms meaning there was 0% packet loss. We also get information such as ip address of google.com which as seen 216.58.223.100.

  • Ifconfig

This command shows the status of the current active interfaces. It’s additionally utilized in configuration of the kernel-resident network interfaces.

 In the above screenshot, we see the IPv4 (inet) address is seen as 127.0.0.1 We also see information such as IPv6 (inet6), net mask, broadcast ip.

  • Netstat

This command shows network connections (inbound and outbound), interface statistics, routing tables, masquerade connections, and network protocol statistics.

  • nslookup

This command is utilized to query Internet servers e.g. google.com interactively for information as shown below.

From the above image, we find out the IP address of google.com to be 216.58.223.110 (IPv4) and the 2a00:1450:401a:804::200e (IPv6).

  • Hostname

This command is used to show and set the system’s host name.

In the above, we see our hostname is ‘parrot.’ The next command ‘hostname Sai-Kumar sets our hostname to Sai-Kumar as shown.

  • ARP

‘ARP’ stands Address Resolution Protocol. The ‘arp’ command changes or shows the kernel’s IPv4 network neighbouring cache. It can add or delete entries to the table, or show the current content. It shows and manipulates the IP to Physical address translation tables used by address ARP.

 

References

[1]. Boulanger, Alan. “Open-source versus proprietary software: Is one more reliable and  secure than the other?” IBM Systems Journal 44, no. 2 (2015): 239-248

[2]. Bovet, Daniel P., and Marco Cesati. Understanding the Linux Kernel: from I/O ports to process management. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”, 2015.

[3]. Morris, James, Stephen Smalley, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. “Linux security modules: General security support for the linux kernel.” In USENIX Security Symposium. 2012.

[4]. Ritchie, Dennis M., and Ken Thompson. “The UNIX time?sharing system.” Bell System Technical Journal 57, no. 6 1905-1929, 2009.

[5]. Silberschatz, Abraham, Greg Gagne, and Peter B. Galvin. Operating system concepts. Wiley, 2018

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