Developing a reconfigurable network lab

• Authors: Sam Abbott-McCune;A. J. Newtson;Jeffrey Girard;Bryan S. Goda
• Venue: SIGITE '08 Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
• Year: 2008

Providing adequate hands-on experience of a network is a major component of an Information Technology program. Course requirements, limited budgets, time intensive classroom setup, reconfiguration, and rapidly changing computing technology poses several challenges for most academic institutions. This paper examines designing a reconfigurable network lab to support multiple network courses. Our lab requires the use of equipment with various configurations while minimizing transition time between class periods for different course requirements or student projects. The multipurpose lab can be utilized for hands-on student learning, simple instructor demonstrations, demonstrations of multi-tiered networks with real time analysis, and site-to-site intercollegiate network-based competitions. In the future, our lab will provide students visual real time feedback similar to a network operations center (NOC); exposing the impact of their efforts in administrating and configuring their network design. This paper discusses strengths and weaknesses of the design and covers in detail the configuration of the classroom lab. Beneficial goals are to integrate software visualization tools, such as ""Nagios"" (a network monitoring tool) and virtual machines (for ease of operating system changes). The lab creates a multifunctional network classroom to facilitate education of cross discipline classes as well as focusing students with a deeper understanding of network science concepts. Our students will be able to apply their knowledge learned in the classroom during academic internships with industry. A more flexible lab means lower overall cost because of lab reuse and the ability to meet future needs.