Introduction

Activities are in-class exercises that bridge the gap between lecture reading and graded labs. Each activity is tied to a specific lecture and assumes you have read the corresponding chapter beforehand. They are designed to be completed during a class session (60-90 minutes) with instructor support available.

Activities differ from labs in scope and stakes. A lab is a hands-on exercise that builds the skills needed to complete the assignments and ties in with the corresponding lecture notes. An activity is a focused in-class exercise that reinforces a specific set of concepts from a lecture, giving you some practice before you encounter those concepts in a larger context.

Activity	Tied to Lecture	What You Practice
Hardware Build Specification	Hardware Fundamentals	Component compatibility, platform selection, spec reading
Virtual Machine Fundamentals	Virtualization and Virtual Machines	Snapshots, restore, hypervisor types and tradeoffs
Install Arch Linux from Scratch	Linux Server Planning and Configuration	Partitioning, filesystems, bootloaders, users, packages, networking, systemd
Network Detective	Networking Fundamentals	Traceroute, netstat, dig, nmap
Container Exploration	Containerization with Docker	Dockerfile syntax, image layers, debugging build errors
AWS Infrastructure: Networks, Identity, and Storage	Cloud Networking, Storage, and Identity	VPC design, IAM roles and policies, S3 buckets and permissions