Abstract
Hands-on experience to bolster skills acquired in the classroom is indispensable for training IT operators. Hands-on experience is especially important for students to gain an understanding of the various network behaviors and to acquire operational skills. However, students cannot be permitted the luxury of misoperation on the Internet because it is such an important social infrastructure and it is difficult to make changes to Internet configurations. To resolve this dilemma, hands-on environments separated from real environments have been proposed and implemented. As another worldwide trend is that network testbeds are being developed to evaluate network techniques. We believe that such testbeds would be used as training platforms for operators. In this paper, we describe how the StarBED; a network testbed and SpringOS; supporting software especially for StarBED can be used to build hands-on environments. Moreover, we explain how the testbed was used in the SOI Asia 2008 Spring Global E-Workshop and Hands-on Workshop for Network Incidents.
