Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BACKGROUND
A comprehensive university, California State University, Los Angeles (CSLA), offers
a broad range of liberal arts and professional programs. The college of Business and
Economics is nationally accredited, at graduate and undergraduate levels, by AACSB . The
college offers undergraduate programs leading to bachelor's degrees in Business Adminis-
tration, Computer Information Systems (CIS), and Economics.
Traditionally, the information technology (IT) training and practices for students are
based on the client technology of the client-server architecture (Watson, 2001). As the
Internet shifts the emphasis from clients to servers and as the clients are more frequently
implemented as personal servers, it becomes apparent that there is a need to enlarge the scope
of the CIS curriculum by providing more server-focused courses.
Technological support of such server-focused training is fairly complex, as it goes to
the core functions of the server operating system administration and to the core of the
database server administration. Server-focused knowledge and skills are also at the center
of e-business. This leads us to a new (and much in demand) category of
server-focused
courses
at CIS department.
MISSION
The Unix Lab, an innovative academic resource for CIS students and faculty, is currently
designed to provide server-focused training for Unix/Linux Administrators and Oracle DBAs.
It is committed to (Djoudi, 2001):
•
Supporting traditional and innovative curriculum content
•
Advancing the learning and teaching experience in Unix, Linux, and Oracle in a
predictable atmosphere of competence, control, and satisfaction
•
Using information-based techniques with promising new capabilities for enhancing
quality of IT education for CIS students, such as personal database servers, interactive
learning, virtual classrooms, distance learning, and wireless technology
To accomplish this, the CIS Department established academic and business contact
with similar labs at other universities and IT businesses from whom the experience,
methodological materials, and advisement have been secured. Certificate of knowledge is a
current trend in corporate training. The CIS Department is seeking educational and IT
resources for the Unix Lab necessary to collaborate with recognized certificate programs such
as Sun, Oracle, and Rational Software.
ARCHITECTURE
The Unix Lab (UL) consists of two branches — the
main
walk-in UL branch — Direct
Access Unix Lab (DAUL) facility and UL extension —
Remote Access Unix Lab (RAUL)
facility at Academic Technology Support (ATS) department. Both, DAUL and RAUL, are
built on Sun servers and Sun workstations (used as microservers) for server-centered and
server-critical training, as illustrated in Figure 1.
RAUL
is a new solution to the need for the server-focused training such as Oracle DBAs
or system administrators on an individual basis: a dedicated microserver is assigned to a
