Final Paper Information



Due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, December 2



What should be in the paper?

As you are graduate students, I will expect that your paper will be of submission quality. Your paper should be on a system administration topic area that you would like to follow up on. It should be at least five to seven pages, and certainly more are welcome. Some suggestions might be

  1. Writing about a new area such as a new filesystem (e.g. btrfs), new approaches to booting, or developments in security.
  2. A well-understood topic such as NFS, server room power provisioning, or Samba and how it has been recently expanded.
  3. Independent work, where you outline an innovative procedure or thought, such as a new approach to monitoring a number of computer systems or even something like a new file system design.
  4. A significant installation project in the lab environment, such as setting up a three-layer architecture (a.k.a. three tier architecture) service. Please set up separate virtual machines for these. An example would be setting up an Asterisk server and some virtual clients.


Physical format

Please print the paper single-sided, on lettersize (8.5 x 11) paper, and the text should be double-spaced. Please staple your paper. Please do not email me this paper, it should be handed to me in class on December 2nd.

TurnItIn

In order to automate the process of finding plagiarism, we will also use TurnItIn. You must submit a copy of your paper before class on December 2nd to the TurnItIn system via Blackboard. This will be the only use of Blackboard we will make this semester.

Late Policy

As stated in the syllabus, no late submissions will be submitted.

Grading

The paper will be graded on adherence to formatting instructions, good grammar and punctuation, and, of course, your content.