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Nicholas Young

Abstract/Description

This undergraduate departmental honors capstone project experiments with and demonstrates System Administration practices that are used in enterprise environments. The skills and practices of System Administrators are crucial to maintain large-scale IT infrastructure. This project aimed to gain a deeper, practical understanding of the role of a System Administrator in an emulated environment. Through hands-on experimentation, this project addressed the responsibilities of a System Administrator, such as controlling user access, adding hardware, automating tasks, monitoring systems, overseeing and developing a backup strategy, maintaining local documentation, and security practices. This project demonstrated some of the complexities that lie in each of these processes, and goes on to explain where more potential for growth and improvement is possible. User access for a large scale environment was deployed, and automation that can scale to an arbitrary size was applied. This process successfully deepened my understanding of System Administration practices, with these systems deployed I have been able to understand how networks and tools interact in a way I haven’t been able to before.

Note on the Author

Nicholas Young is a 2025 graduate of BSU who majored in Computer Science and minored in Statistics. His undergraduate honors research was completed under the mentorship of Dr. Margaret Black (Department of Computer Science). After years of fascination with Linux and system operations, Nick's plans after graduation are to pursue an RHCSA certification and a career in System Administration.

Rights Statement

Articles published in The Undergraduate Review are the property of the individual contributors and may not be reprinted, reformatted, repurposed or duplicated, without the contributor’s consent.

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