Open Source Platform for Teaching Administration of Unix-like Systems

Unix-like operating systems are time-proven leaders of the server-side software and have cumulative share of ~60%. At least 10% of Unix-like systems are used on personal computers. Popularity of cloud based on-demand infrastructure (SaaS) has simplified the process of obtaining the hosting platforms for the developers. As a result, the demand for qualified administrators of Unix-like systems is growing rapidly. Education of Unix-like system administrators is a complicated and uncertain task due to diversity and large amount of different Unix-like platforms. The vendors of commercial distributions offer training courses and certifications. However, a significant number of open source distributions are remaining uncovered by structured and defined training routines. Considering these facts, we organized an open e-course relying on Debian Linux. In this paper, we will share our experience of the course development and teaching. Our main contributions are a scalable, secured and automatic task verification system; and a supplementary infrastructure solution that allows performing the course tasks at any location with internet access. Powering the course with these two developed components resulted in improvement of time resource and course quality. In addition, we will describe our developed solution in detail and analyze qualitative feedback of the students gathered during three years of teaching.