For this Independent Study, I will be continuing my work from this past Fall's Senior Seminar & Project. During that semester, I designed a network management tool for network configuration. This tool has been primarily designed for use here at Earlham to manage the configuration and registration of new computers on campus (both student and faculty/staff). I was only able to get to the end of the design stages by the end of the semester. This semster I will be actually building (otherwise known as implementing) the tool and testing it to prepare it for intergration into the systems here at Earlham for use as soon as pratical. My goal is to have the utility copleted and the preliminary testing compleeted by the end of this semester. I plan on working closely with the staff in ECS to achieve the tools which I require and so-as to not inconvenience them.

Jim Rogers (my Supervisor) and I have agreed that the evaluation for this project will be via the assessment of the deliverables which I produce. These include the working utility, with fully documented code, and a packaged set of documentation which will consist of the previously completed design spec, and user documentation (both for the administrator and the end user).

To explain in a little more detail what I am doing, I am creating a Network Management Tool which will hopefully facilitate in the management of many computers in a large LAN where things are not always homogeneous from place to place. More specifically, I will be emphasizing on the Software Development steps required for a large organized project. Due to the nature of my project and the fact that I will hopefully not be the only end-user of this product, I will be putting special emphasis on the Requirements Analysis stage of the development.

For more information, please check the links below for the latest posted developments. Also, check out my journal entries, as they should be a valuable source of information as I work on the project.

Bibliography

1
Christopher John Date.
An introduction to database systems.
Addison-Wesley, 7th edition, October 1999.

2
Dick Hamlet and Joe Maybee.
The Engineering of Software.
Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2001.
Technical Foundations for the Individual.

3
IEEE Computer Society, New York.
Guide for Developing System Requirements Specifications, 1998.

4
Leszek A. Maciaszek.
Requirements Analysis and System Design.
Addison-Wesley, Harlow, 2001.
Developing Informatoin Systems with UML.

5
Steve McConnell.
Code Complete.
Microsoft Press, Washington, 1993.
A Practical Handbook of Sofware Construction.

6
PostgreSQL, http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/.
PostgreSQL Interactive Documentation, 2001.

7
Larry Wall et al.
Programming Perl.
O'Reilly, 3rd edition, July 2000.

Usefull Links:

Here are some of the links that I have found usefull while working on this project and making the decisions that I did: