Independent study offers a student an opportunity to explore, in greater depth, a topic previously introduced in a prior course or a topic of special interest. A faculty member supervises the student's work. A student and faculty member will collaboratively develop an independent study proposal that describes the student's plan of work, expected deliverables, evaluation criteria, and number of credits that will be earned. Requires department consent.

An introduction to the Linux operating system and scripting in high-level and shell languages. The course will cover basic user-level commands to the Linux operating system, followed by basic control structures, and data structures in both high-level and shell languages of choice. Examples will include interfacing with the underlying operating system and processing structured data. Students will need one year of programming in an object-oriented language.

This course is designed to give students an understanding of the role of the system administrator in large organizations. This will be accomplished through a discussion of many of the tasks and tools of system administration. Students will participate in both a lecture section and a separate lab section. The technologies discussed in this class include: operating systems, system security, and service deployment strategies.

This class will take the students through the evolution of virtualization. The class begins with virtual network topologies such as VLANs, trunks and virtual routing and forwarding. The class will examine the various desktop virtualization platforms (Type 1) such as VirtualBox and VMWare workstation. Midway through the class students will transition into bare metal hypervisors (Type 2) and server virtualization. Elements of software defined networking, storage (ex. iSCSI) and cloud computing will also be discussed.

This course will explore the skills required of a systems administrator in a large enterprise organization. Students will gain experience in managing an integrated Linux and Windows environment, using identity management, monitoring, and centralized logging systems. Other areas of examination will include a deeper understanding of many protocols including DNS, DHCP, SNMP, LDAP, IMAP, and SMTP. Containerization and virtualization concepts will also be explored. The student will also study security topics including Transport Layer Security, Pluggable Authentication Modules, SELinux, Kerberos, and Group Policy Objects. This course is a writing-intensive course that will require students to write a formal research paper.

This course is designed to provide a focused examination of DevOps from an operational perspective. It aims to integrate the disciplines of software development and Information Technology operations. Participants will engage in hands-on learning experiences that cover the deployment of containerized applications, the construction of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and the implementation of workflow automation strategies. The curriculum also includes an in-depth analysis of critical DevOps tools and explores advanced subjects such as Orchestration, Containerization, and Infrastructure as Code. By the course's conclusion, students will have acquired practical skills in Version Control and Automation, equipping them for the complexities of modern IT environments.