System Administrator for VFX and Animation – Entry Level

Duration: 5 weeks
Cost: €650 pp (Invoice Only)
Dates: From January 26th

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Monday January 23rd

This course is designed to train new entrants or juniors in the basic steps of system administration in a VFX or Animation studio. This is a junior level upskilling opportunity and is the starting point to learning about the animation industry and IT  environment, which differs greatly from other industries.

Candidates are ideally recent graduates from IT courses or juniors already in a studio environment in the IT or Tech departments.

Igor Podgorski
Infrastructure systems architect and engineer and owner at Smooth Sailing Ltd. IT Professional Services.

Brian Gilmore – CMAI – Course Director
Animation Technology & Production Consultant working with some of the best Studios in the Animation Industry.

This Course is 5 days spread over 5 weeks consisting of lectures and hands on demonstrations as well as self-led learning and assignments.

• The course will be online (Microsoft Teams) – 1 day a week of live lectures and demonstrations
• All lectures are recorded and available for reference for a limited period
• Other course material and references will also be supplied.
• All participants must have access to a computer with a stable Internet connection

Week 1:

• Working in animation and VFX studios (compared to other office environments)
  • Goals of studio sys admins (not just installing servers)
  • People and communication
  • Confidentiality and IT security
• Work processes best practices
  • keeping track of requests and work in progress
  • documentation
  • inventory
  • time management
• Studio IT architecture overview
  • network
  • storage
  • compute resources
  • configuration systems
  • high availability and uptime
  • Pipeline and systems integration overview

Week 2:

• Linux
  • Distributions overview
  • RH/CentOS installation process
  • Software management
    • rpm
    • tar archives
    • install scripts
    • Attended with GUI Vs unattended silent install
  • Bash scripting intro
  • SELinux intro
  • Storage/block devices management
    • partitions, formatting
    • LVM (logical volume management)
  • Process management

Week 3:

• NAS, SAN, volumes and shares overview
• RAID levels
• File systems access protocols:
• SMB
  • use from Windows & Linux
  • ACLs (file/folder permissions) – Viewing and setting
• NFS
  • Nfsv3 Vs Nfsv4
  • ACLs (file/folder permissions) – Viewing and setting
• Storage administration
  • Pixit administration
  • QNAP
  • Isilon?

Week 4:

• Network
  • TCP/UDP, IP
  • DNS, DHCP, PXE,…
  • VLAN overview
    • subnets calculation
  • generic switch configuration
    • use CISCO/DELL/other manufacturer for practice
  • Firewalls introduction
    • rules
    • NAT
    • VPN
    • QoS
    • Windows firewall
    • Linux firewalld

Week 5:

• ActiveDirectory and domain controllers (DCs)
  • DC services
  • Organisational units (OUs)
  • User administration and privileges
  • LDAP access
  • Windows and Linux integration overview
• Virtualisation overview
  • Hypervisors in general
  • Specific products:
    • VMWare
    • Proxmox
    • VirtualBox
  • Security requirements overview
    • based on TPN and best practices

Please complete the registration below and choose the ‘Invoice’ option.

An invoice will be issued by Cultural & Creative Industries Skillnet and sent to whomever is indicated in the ‘Send Invoice To’ field.  If not you, please enter company name, address and person responsible for accounts.

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Monday 23rd January.