"Teaching System Administration" talk at Open Source Bridge in Portland, June 2009

1. Teaching System Administration
Steve VanDevender
University of Oregon

2. How did this happen to me?
● I didn't originally have an ambition to be a
teacher
● Attended LISA '99 System Administration
Education Workshop on a whim
● Started asking computer science department
faculty about a system administration class
– One answer: “But that would be too practical”
– Another answer: “That would be great! Will you
teach it?”

3. Discussion: How do you feel about
teaching?
● Would you want to teach?
● What excites you about teaching?
● What frightens you about teaching?

4. What had I gotten myself into?
● The LISA education workshop had a wide
representation of people and not a lot of
common agreement:
– Educators and non-educators
– Academic and commercial organizations
– Education or training?
– Among educators, very different approaches to
teaching
● The hard part is trying to nail down what system
administration is all about

5. Discussion: The most important
thing in system administration
● If you had to teach a new system administrator,
what aspects of the profession would you
consider most important to teach?

6. So I had to design a class . . .
● My constraints:
– 8-week summer session class
– Couldn't assume students would have extensive
UNIX knowledge
– Dedicated lab (sort of a non-constraint)
● Virtual machines could make this possible without a
dedicated lab
– No teaching assistant (so I had to do all grading
myself)

7. My personal notions about teaching
● Written tests are artificial, and I couldn't figure
out how to make good ones for this topic
● System administration seems especially well-
suited to hands-on assignments
● Students should have more than one way to
learn things (lecture, textbook, personal
interaction, independent study)
● I always hated unclear, underspecified
assignments

8. The implementation
● Students work in groups
– Emphasizes communication themes (but also
cleverly handles limited lab space)
● Grade is primarily based on a series of projects
to install and develop a system
– Later added class discussions
– Objective grading (did it work or not?)
● Final project that students get to design
themselves, as a way of teaching basic project
management

9. Course website online
● http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/09U/cis399sysadmin
● Previous years are also available
– http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/index.php?course=cis399sysadmin
– http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/index.php?course=cis410sysadmin

10. Dangerous choices that worked
● Working in groups
– Fewer group issues than I anticipated
– Stole a good idea (from Evi Nemeth) about group
work evaluation: students each provide private
estimates about member contributions
● Gave students their choice of operating system
(of a freely-available UNIX or Linux distribution)
● System emergency day!

11. Teaching System Administration
Steve VanDevender
University of Oregon
1

12. How did this happen to me?
● I didn't originally have an ambition to be a
teacher
● Attended LISA '99 System Administration
Education Workshop on a whim
● Started asking computer science department
faculty about a system administration class
– One answer: “But that would be too practical”
– Another answer: “That would be great! Will you
teach it?”
2

13. Discussion: How do you feel about
teaching?
● Would you want to teach?
● What excites you about teaching?
● What frightens you about teaching?
3

14. What had I gotten myself into?
● The LISA education workshop had a wide
representation of people and not a lot of
common agreement:
– Educators and non-educators
– Academic and commercial organizations
– Education or training?
– Among educators, very different approaches to
teaching
● The hard part is trying to nail down what system
administration is all about
4

15. Discussion: The most important
thing in system administration
● If you had to teach a new system administrator,
what aspects of the profession would you
consider most important to teach?
5

16. So I had to design a class . . .
● My constraints:
– 8-week summer session class
– Couldn't assume students would have extensive
UNIX knowledge
– Dedicated lab (sort of a non-constraint)
● Virtual machines could make this possible without a
dedicated lab
– No teaching assistant (so I had to do all grading
myself)
6

17. My personal notions about teaching
● Written tests are artificial, and I couldn't figure
out how to make good ones for this topic
● System administration seems especially well-
suited to hands-on assignments
● Students should have more than one way to
learn things (lecture, textbook, personal
interaction, independent study)
● I always hated unclear, underspecified
assignments
7

18. The implementation
● Students work in groups
– Emphasizes communication themes (but also
cleverly handles limited lab space)
● Grade is primarily based on a series of projects
to install and develop a system
– Later added class discussions
– Objective grading (did it work or not?)
● Final project that students get to design
themselves, as a way of teaching basic project
management
8

19. Course website online
● http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/09U/cis399sysadmin
● Previous years are also available
– http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/index.php?course=cis399sysadmin
– http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/index.php?course=cis410sysadmin
9

20. Dangerous choices that worked
● Working in groups
– Fewer group issues than I anticipated
– Stole a good idea (from Evi Nemeth) about group
work evaluation: students each provide private
estimates about member contributions
● Gave students their choice of operating system
(of a freely-available UNIX or Linux distribution)
● System emergency day!
10