A teacher asked me If I could talk about my job as a linux sysadmin in his class. The course is called "Introduction to Operating systems" and i've been given 45 minutes to talk. The students are beginning their second year, so they've had a bit of experience with programming in different languages.

What i'm like to do is show a series of hands-on examples of the kinds of things I do on a regular basis. I've already got a few ideas jotted down, but I'm afraid that they might be either too advanced or too simple for the students to appreciate. Another concern is that a topic might be too long to explain and use too much time overall.

Here are a few ideas :

• Program deployment using version control (git in my case)
• filtering apache logs using grep, awk, uniq, tail
• A couple of bash scripts that i've made for various stuff on servers
• live montitoring (htop, iotop, iptraf)
• creating databases and assigning roles in mysql/postgresql

So, are these ideas any good ? Do you have better ideas ? are the ideas too simple and should I go for more "advanced" stuff ?