OPS335 Short-Term

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Current Semester (Winter 2016)

Major Concerns - Winter 2016 Semester

There is a major concern how to properly address and improve the OPS335 resources for students given the time available to deliver the course. Although this is a daunting task, there are many positives to consider.


Positive Action

  • The same OPS335 template (used for OPS235 curriculum issues and improvements) is now being used and addressing these issues
  • There is a healthy participation with many of the OPS335 faculty to note their concerns
  • Listing of alternative online resources and possible labs that have been used for past 4 semesters
  • Tips and suggestions on how to avoid problems so that they be incorporated for the up-coming semester


Discussion (Participation) from OPS335 Faculty

  1. The number of topics in the current form of the course is impossible for the students. I haven't had a single one excell at all of them and I've had some very talented students. We need to pick some topics we feel would be crucial and drop the rest or reduce the rest to study-only-no-labs (the latter seems useless to me) --Andrew

  2. I've found the number of labs is reasonable, provided the labs:
    1. work in general (which I found was the biggest issue, and thus modified all the labs the first semester I taught the course (in some cases had to do a complete rewrite)
    2. Allow Post-iptables labs to work. I have my students flush the rules, set the default policies to accept and save them as such (and disable firewalld). This way when they troubleshoot problems, at least it's not iptables getting in the way. --Jason

  3. Eleven labs seems to be a lot of labs for this course. Can't students simply use c7host that they created in OPS235 (with tweaks) in order to streamline labs 0 and 1? Can students use their existing OPS235 removable hard drives to reduce re-installing CENTOS7?
    • I don't think there should be a lab0. That setup should be done on their own time in advance, all needed to do the setup was learned in OPS235. If the students don't remember - that's a good reason for them to spend extra time getting a refresher on OPS235. -- Andrew
    • Same for networking. All the students had trouble with basic network setup. They need to be told to go back on their own and remember how to configure an interface. And they have to be tested on it for the first 2-3 weeks to make sure they know it's a serious requirement. --Andrew

    • Can't use c7host from 235 because a good number of students don't have it any more, it's not unusual for students to go to coop between 235 and 335. -- Andrew

      • UPDATE: According to Scott Apted:
      students going to co-op before doing OPS335 will not be valid as of September 2016

    • Of the existing labs to drop, I think ftp should go. I'm debating the benefits of dropping it entirely at night, or replacing it with something cloud based -- like ownCloud. -- Jason

  4. Would be preferable to include online resources (as opposed to out-of-sync textbooks) to discuss the concepts and properly prepare them for the lab-work:



    Or here are alternative online resources that are already used for OPS335 continuing Education - could these be used or incorporated?(May be out of sync):



  5. Here is an alternative set of OPS335 labs (Continuing Education) to the ones used in Weekly Schedule in current OPS335 WIKI:

    [ alternative labs ]

  6. Labs need to be worth more, 2% per lab in OPS235 seems to work well. --Andrew
    • Fully agree, my breakdown at night (Continuing Education) that I largely inherited is differently weighted, copy/pasted the breakdown as follows:
      • Quizzes (1 per lab, staggered a week after the lab is introduced as in uli101 & ops235) - 10%
      • Tests (mid term) - 30%
      • Assignments (1 - broken down into several parts)- 10%
      • Lab work - 20%
      • Final Exam -30%
      • I'm planning on dropping the weighting of the mid term to 25%, and upping the assignment to 15% as I find at 10% a good portion of the students don't even bother doing it. The above breakdown addresses Andrew's point about quizzes as well -- Jason

  7. Need lots of small quizzes. Perhaps one per week unless nothing new's been taught that week. --Andrew

  8. Need two tests, preferably practical - especially since the exam is written. -- Andrew
    • I have one written mid-term currently. There's pros and cons to a practical test, I try to cover more troubleshooting and questions directly from the labs in my written tests. The downside to a practical is having to rely on Seneca's network working (which is unreliable at best). Instead I have 1 assignment, research and implement something not covered in the course, and provide detailed documentation as to how to do it (similar level of detail as given in the labs). -- Jason

  9. Use CentOS on the virtual machines. Using Fedora has been no more successful in OPS335 than in OPS235. CentOS has problems but it's consistent and reliable. Fedora will do some random crap you won't believe. All the tools and services used in the course are equivalent between CentOS and Fedora (except yum/dnf which are the same anyway). --Andrew
    • I use centos 6.7 on the host (because 7 caused issues with portabity - crashes completely if there's a significant change in hardware and won't boot again. centos 7 on all 3 virtual machines -- Jason

  10. Iptables is really complex but still the industry standard for firewalls. Firewalld may or may not (probably not) replace it. There's no time to teach both, should get rid of Firewalld completely. --Andrew
    • Fully agree - I've been trying to figure out how to mix Firewalld into the course, presently I only cover iptables. -- Jason

Previous Semesters


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