This course equips students with the knowledge and skills needed to manage the technological infrastructure of a small IT environment that supports 100-500 employees. Topics to be covered includearchitectures, heterogeneous systems, authentication and security, network services including firewalls, storage services, performance analysis and tuning, management and configuration of services and system resources, system initialization, drivers, cross-platform services, policies and procedures. Students pursuing careers in system administration, network administration or software development; or those who desire deeper knowledge of how to manage the systems that are the foundation of all IT organizations will find this course beneficial. The course is very practical in nature and will be delivered by face-to-face instruction in the form of lectures and lab sessions. Some aspects of the course will be delivered online and through in-class discussions.
On successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
· Describe the role of the system administrator
· Explain the organization of IT systems
· Apply techniques to interoperate computer systems comprised of Linux and Windows machines
· Manage effectively users, files, and software on a computer system installation consisting of clients and servers
· Install and configure networking services for intranet and Internet domains
· Demonstrate the installation and configuration of Linux and Windows virtual machines
· Analyse network security policies in Linux and Windows environments
· Develop scripting mechanisms and automated scripts for performing complicated administration tasks · Evaluate alternative policies and mechanisms for providing reliability features of computer system services and operations
· Design and deploy systems to manage large amounts of data for a wide variety of users in a small to medium-sized business IT infrastructure.
IT managers; IT team leaders; Application developers; Web Application Developers; Network Administrators; System Administrators; Application Security Analysts; Computer Science/IT graduates who want to acquire knowledge and skills in system administration
The following topics/concepts/theories/issues will be addressed:
· The role of system administrators
· Organization of IT Systems
· Hardware and Software Configuration Basics
· File Systems and Disk Issues
· Introduction to network administration
· Start-up and shutdown procedures
· Observation, automation, logging and Backups
· Security and ethics in system administration
· Local and network services
· Performance analysis and tuning
· Software deployment and IT support management
· User support, maintenance and change management
There are no specific requirements to be eligible to enroll is this course.
This course will be delivered using a combination of interactive lectures, online and face-to-face discussions and laboratories. Students are required to read preparatory material and complete assigned homework given by the lecturer and be prepared to participate in discussions. Laboratory sessions will be used to provide hands-on experiences in system administration. Students are expected to prepare assigned developmental exercises prior to arriving at the laboratory.
Credit Hours Five (4) hours of lectures and two (4) hours of labs each week for six (6) weeks.
Dr. C. Gittens (Coordinator)
