Computer Science 182
System Administration
Syllabus, Spring 1997

Professor: Mike Erlinger
Office: Olin 249
Phone: x18912
E-mail: mike@cs.hmc.edu

Meeting Times: Monday & Wednesday 4:15-5:30 PM
Meeting Place: Beckman 105

Graders::
Secretary: Nancy Mandala, Olin 240, 621-8225, (Part-Time: 1-5pm)

Texts

UNIX System Administration Handbook, Revised Edition, by Eve Nemeth, et.al., Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-151051-7.

Other Texts

The Whole Internet, Second Edition, E. Krol, O'Reilly.

Essential System Administration, Allen Frisch, O'Reilly.

What Is This Course About?

In recent years the area of System Administration has begun to attain the status of a focused area in computer science. This course will consist of lectures on general system administration topics, individual projects, and group projects in system administration. Issues such as operating system installation, disk configuration, user management, software subsystem management (e.g., mail, news, dns), operating policies, system performance issues, security, and documentation will be investigated. This course assumes the material in cs110 and cs124.

Approach

The class will be divided into a series of teams with each team being responsible for a system. Each team will then install and administer one of the UNIX variants, adding various subsystems throughout the semester. Lectures will cover various system administration topics, with the course being more hands-on than the usual lecture course. Each team will make a series of presentations, one on their basic system installation and others on particular subsystems. Individual projects will consist of small sysadmin projects and a research paper with a presentation.

Requirements and Grades

Grades will be based on both individual and team performance. The course members will be the primary graders.

Collaboration Policy

Obviously, this course encourages collaboration. Since it is a project oriented course (no tests) I expect that members of each group will contribute to the various group activities and at the end of the semester groups will evaluate themselves.

List of Topics

Last modified January 17, 1997 by mike@cs.hmc.edu