AI Admin

Course Information Sheet

• Title: AI In Administrative Tasks
• Prerequisites: Shell Scripting. Solid shell scripting skills.
• Duration: 12 hours (8 sessions of 1.5 hours each).
• Objectives:
• Use AI assistants to accelerate problem-solving and code generation.
• Apply AI to concrete use cases: log analysis, security, monitoring.
• Understand the principles of "prompt engineering" adapted to system tasks.
• Assessment: Continuous assessment (Practical Labs), project, final exam.

8-Session Breakdown

Session 1: Introduction to AI for System Administration

• Lesson: What is an LLM? Overview of AI tools for the CLI. Potential, limitations, and ethical considerations.
• Lab/Assessment: Installation and configuration of a tool (e.g., GitHub Copilot for CLI). First simple prompts.

Session 2: Command Generation and Explanation

• Lesson: The art of "prompting": how to translate a need into an effective AI query. Use cases: "explain this command," "find the command for...".
• Lab/Assessment: Series of challenges to be solved using AI to find and understand complex commands (find, rsync, iptables).

Session 3: AI-Assisted Script Generation

• Lesson: From a simple command to a complete script. How to specify the logic, error handling, and desired output format to the AI.
• Lab/Assessment: Generate a script that automates the creation of new users (with input validation).

Session 4: Iterative Code Refinement and Debugging with AI

• Lesson: Using AI as a "pair programming" partner. Submitting an existing script to improve, refactor, or debug it.
• Lab/Assessment: Take a simple script and ask the AI to add logging, better error handling, and comments.

Session 5: AI-Augmented Log Analysis

• Lesson: Strategies for analyzing large volumes of logs. Prompts for anomaly detection, activity summarization, and event correlation.
• Lab/Assessment: Analyze an auth.log to produce a security report (brute-force attempts, successful logins by user).

Session 6: AI for Configuration and Security

• Lesson: Generate configuration files (Nginx, Apache, SSH). Audit an existing configuration with AI to identify potential security vulnerabilities.
• Lab/Assessment: Generate a secure Nginx configuration for a static website. Ask the AI to analyze sshd_config and suggest improvements.

Session 7: Concepts of Predictive Monitoring

• Lesson: Introduction to AIOps. How AI can analyze metrics (CPU, RAM) to anticipate problems. Designing intelligent alerts.
• Lab/Assessment: Use AI to write the metric collection script. Discuss data analysis strategies for this data with the AI.

Session 8: Synthesis Project and Future of AI

• Lesson: Reflection on the evolution of the system administrator profession.
• Lab/Assessment: Workshop dedicated to a final project combining scripting and AI (e.g., an intelligent system diagnostic tool) and presentation of results.