veyepar: What Should a Systems Administration Student's Homework Look Like?

Author(s):	Tom Clark
Location	OGGB3
Date	jan Wed 14	Days Raw Files
Start	13:20	First Raw Start	12:25
Duration	0:45:00	Offset	0:54:04
End	14:05	Last Raw End	14:14
Chapters	00:00
Total cuts_time	48 min.

http://lca2015.linux.org.au/schedule/30121/view_talk
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When we teach computer programming, we have a pretty good idea of what the homework looks like.  We have the students write programs, and then we assess the programs' functionality and quality.  But what about systems administration?  We could have students configure servers and then assess the configuration, but the real work of systems administration is in operating the servers.  How do we evaluate that?

In the systems administration course at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand, students operate a web service using around the clock for two weeks while they are presented with a variety of scenarios and challenges.  They are assessed on observed system uptime together with their performance on the problem scenarios.  Open source software like Linux, Puppet, and Nagios are used by students and instructors to accomplish this.

In this presentation we will look at lessons learned from running this activity in a recent instance of the course.  We will see how the same open source tools used by systems administrators can be used to teach systems administration.  We will also discuss work to improve the the delivery and assessment of the activity in the future.

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