Here's the backmatter of the book: ``Practical exercises in system administration can render a machine unusable, and restoring the machine requires manpower which is often scarce. As a result, there is a lack of dedicated exercise machines which can be used in the education of system administration. The Virtual Unix Laboratory is an interactive e-learning system that provides a solution for this situation. After sign-up, machines are installed on which students can do their exercises with full "root"-access. At the end of the exercise, the system checks which parts were done correctly, and gives feedback.

The first part of this book describes the goals of the Virtual Unix Lab and related works, followed by observations about education of system administration. In the second part, the Verification Unit Domain Specific Language (VUDSL) is defined, and diagnosis of the Virtual Unix Lab exercise results and feedback to the user are realized with it. An evaluation of the system shows interesting results and identify areas for further improvement. The third part explains how tutoring and user adaption can be realized. An architecture for a tutoring component for the Virtual Unix Lab is described, and user adaption is based on the user model built by the tutoring component.''

The system was implemented on a machine running NetBSD, training systems available were NetBSD/sparc and Solaris/sparc. Interesting technical points where configuring access to the lab machines by enabling IPfilter rules from the user's webbrowser, and disabling the rules by an at(1) job. Also, the system to install the lab clients used disk images and NetBSD in netbooted environment.

I hope that's enough of a reason to post this here.
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[Tags: dsl, hubertf, Publications, training, vulab]

The system is the core part of my PhD-thesis (to come :), and I've published three technical reports that describe a number of aspects of the systems in lengthy details. Those interested can find them here:

• ``Education of System Administration'' (December 2007, english language, 39 pages)
• ``Implementing exercise result verification for the Virtual Unix Lab'' (December 2007, english language, 89 pages)
• ``Impact of the Virtual Unix Lab: Evaluation of end-of-semester paper tests'' (December 2007, english language, 71 pages)

An introduction and overview of the system's operation can be found in this EuroBSDCon paper.

The thesis will assume the version of the lab described above, including the domain specific languages techniques, diagnosis and feedback, and describe how to implement tutoring and user adaption on top of that.

[Tags: hubertf, vulab]

So what keeps me busy these days (in case someone cares): After my previous teachers failed miserably in teaching me statistics, I'm doing exactly that now, to do some decent evaluation of my Virtual Unix Lab.

Funny tools for helping to understand a few statistical basics include gnumeric, and I'm especially impressed by the "R" system, which is a mathematical programming system that comes with lots of ready-to-use statistical and graphical functions, and which is similar to the "S" system developed by Bell Labs. For some playing, install R ("cd pkgsrc/math/R && make install") and run:

      % R
      > demo()
      > demo(Hershey)
      > demo(Japanese)
      > demo(graphics)
      > demo(image)
      > demo(persp)
      > demo(plotmath)
      > q()