A unique laboratory for teaching administrative aspects of computer networking

Explosive growth of the Internet has brought forth a shortage of skilled engineers to design, construct and maintain an appropriate LAN environment in the majority of the organizations connecting to the Internet. However, it is generally difficult to construct a practical learning environment where learners are able to experiment with administrative tasks without any risks. This paper proposes a unique laboratory approach for teaching administrative aspects of computer networking. For the authors´ purpose, sixteen SPARCstation 5/85 are currently employed, which were originally intended to be replaced. Each workstation has a SCSI hard disk, which is easily installable with a convenient attachment. Considering this mechanism results in a unique laboratory for teaching administrative aspects of computer networking. The idea is to prepare pre-installed hard disks with functionality such as a DNS server, that can be used as a building block to construct experimental LAN configurations easily. Necessary server functionalities have been identified considering typical learning patterns based on their administrative experiences, and on the evaluation of the laboratory currently in use