ITC-2850 Assignment Details and Directions

Class Participation

Active, direct engagement is the core driver of this course. Because of our small seminar format, class meetings rely entirely on collaborative problem-solving, open discussion, and real-time lab work. Your participation grade evaluates three key areas:

  • Preparation: Arriving having thoroughly read assigned materials, documentation, and RFCs, ready to discuss underlying concepts without preliminary lecture.

  • Active Lab Collaboration: Engaging fully during hands-on lab sessions—talking through technical logic out loud, testing configurations alongside your peers, and asking probing questions when encountering unexpected system behavior.

  • Architectural Dialogue: Contributing meaningfully to whiteboard sessions, technical trade-off debates, and live troubleshooting exercises as both an engineer and an active listener.

Engineering Journal

Throughout the semester, you will maintain a running, professional Engineering Journal documenting every technology, system topology, and lab deployment we explore. This is not a formal academic paper, but rather an industry-standard engineering log capturing your technical process, choices, and failures. For each lab topic, your journal must include:

  • System Topology & Architecture: Clear diagrams and explanations of the underlying network flow, protocols involved, and system boundaries.

  • Configuration & Implementation: Key command-line entries, configuration file snippets, scripts, and deployment steps with notes on why specific settings were chosen.

  • Troubleshooting & Root-Cause Analysis: Detailed accounts of issues encountered during labs, packet captures analyzed, fault injections diagnosed, and how solutions were derived.

  • Key Takeaways & Best Practices: Personal reflections on security implications, operational edge cases, and performance trade-offs for each technology.

Course Project

For your final assessment, you and a partner will design, build, and demonstrate a complete, integrated infrastructure solution that combines multiple core technologies covered throughout the term (e.g., firewalls, VPNs, IDS/IPS, identity providers/protocols, and authentication providers/protocols). The project consists of three deliverables:

  • Live Infrastructure Demonstration: A functional, end-to-end demonstration of your built system running live in the lab environment.

  • Socratic Technical Defense: A presentation to the instructor detailing your architectural decisions, traffic flows, and security considerations, followed by an interactive Q&A where you defend your design choices against alternative engineering approaches.

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