Week 7 Overview — NETW-0014 Advanced Operating Systems

Exam WeekFour structured review days · One exam day

Six weeks of services, built by hand — now proven under exam conditions

The final exam uses each student's own S1/S2/S3 VM environment as the exam platform. Unlike the earlier mini-assessments, the written and practical portions run back-to-back in a single sitting on Friday: 20 minutes of theory, collected, then straight into 100 minutes of scenario-based terminal work. There is no separate written day and practical day — students need everything sharp on the same morning.

Monday through Thursday are structured review, not new content. Each day walks back through one or two weeks' worth of services, with an emphasis on the diagnostic habits the course has built all term: check the logs, test the config before reloading, verify with the client-side tool as well as the server-side one. Thursday closes with a full VM health check — every service from Weeks 1–6 confirmed running before the exam.

Week at a glance

Monday

Review — Weeks 1–2

SSH, packet analysis, firewalling, NTP, logging

Tuesday

Review — Weeks 3–4

DHCP, DNS, Nginx, SSL, log-based troubleshooting

Wednesday

Review — Week 5

IPSec, PKI, WireGuard, ipsec status / wg show drills

Thursday

Review — Week 6 + Exam Walkthrough

Docker, capstone recap, exam format, full VM health check

Friday

Final Exam

Single sitting · 20 min written + 100 min practical · No notes, no internet

FridayWritten Exam · 20 min · 17% of final mark

Written exam — quick identification, not long-form essays

Section A — Short answer: Core concepts across all six weeks — SSH hardening, NTP stratum, DNS SOA serials, PKI/CA trust. Tight, specific questions, not open-ended essays.
Section B — Command identification: Given a task description, write the exact command. Example: "Test an Nginx configuration for syntax errors without restarting the service." Answer: sudo nginx -t.
Section C — Scenario analysis: One compact scenario — a misconfigured service — diagnosed and explained in writing, no terminal involved.

Written exam topic coverage

Topic Area	Weight	Week Covered
SSH hardening, fail2ban	10%	Week 1
Packet analysis, firewalling, NTP, rsyslog	20%	Week 2
DHCP, DNS zones and records	20%	Week 3
DNS views, Nginx, SSL/TLS	20%	Week 4
IPSec, PKI/CA, WireGuard	20%	Week 5
Docker, docker-compose	10%	Week 6

FridayTerminal Practical · 100 min · 83% of final mark

Terminal practical — building out a branch office's infrastructure, task by task

Format: Students receive a printed scenario document — deploying Linux server infrastructure for a new branch office — and complete a sequence of tasks on their own S1/S2/S3 VMs. Each task has a clear, verifiable outcome.
No notes, no internet. Man pages and --help are available. External resources are not.
Marking: The instructor verifies each task by running specific test commands — the outcome must be correct, not the method, unless a task names a specific tool.

Practical exam task areas

Task Area	Marks	Example verification
Secure remote access	12	Key-auth SSH on a custom port, fail2ban active
Firewall implementation	15	Rule set matches spec, verified live with tcpdump
NTP & centralised logging	13	Stratum hierarchy correct, forwarded log entry appears within 10s
DHCP & DNS zone build	18	Reservation active, zone validated and resolving both ways
Nginx, SSL & DNS views	17	Split-horizon resolution correct, HTTPS redirect working
WireGuard VPN tunnel	15	Peer handshake current, traffic verified over the tunnel
Docker & reverse proxy	10	Container running, proxied end-to-end and confirmed in logs

VM preparation note: Ensure all student VMs have a clean, known-good state at the start of the exam — services in the correct states, no leftover test files from earlier labs. A snapshot taken at the end of Thursday's VM health check is ideal.

Mon–ThuReview days · Structured, instructor-led

Making the most of the four review days

Monday–Wednesday — command reference + scenario walk-throughs: Each day opens with a quick-fire command reference session for that day's weeks, then moves into short scenario walk-throughs modelled on what the practical will ask — diagnose a broken service using only logs and man pages, not the original lab handout.
Thursday — Week 6 review, exam walkthrough, VM health check: Docker and the capstone chain are reviewed first, then the exam format is walked through in detail, then the remaining time is a full VM health check — every service from Weeks 1–6 confirmed running before Friday.

Suggested self-test before Friday

Can you generate an SSH key pair, install it, and disable password auth without locking yourself out — from memory?
Can you write and verify a firewall rule set against a written spec, using tcpdump to confirm each rule?
Can you build a forward and reverse DNS zone from a blank BIND9 install and validate it with named-checkzone?
Can you bring up a WireGuard tunnel between two VMs and prove traffic is actually crossing it?
Can you configure Nginx to proxy_pass to a Docker container and trace a request through the full chain?

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