Master of Networking and Systems Administration
From the "Things the make you go 'hmmm' department"...
In the mail today I received a flyer for the upcoming Australian System Administrator's Conference (aka SAGE-AU'2006). Along with said flyer was another flyer, one for a new offering somehow associated with Charles Sturt University, with the above degree.
Whilst it looks moderately interesting on the outset, it reeks of vendor-specificity when you dig a bit deeper. I'd hope that it teaches a lot of general skills that could be applied anywhere. Certainly, the above Masters degree, whilst sponsored by Novell, only has one subject that sounds excessively Novell-specific, namely "Novell Administration". Hopefully the "Linux Fundamentals", "Linux Administration", "Managing Linux Enterprise Servers" and "Linux Enterprise Security" subjects are sufficiently distribution-agnostic so as not to produce graduates that are hopeless entrenched in one vendor's way of thinking.
Of the the other programs they are offering, they mostly sound excessively Microsoft or Cisco specific, except for the Master of Information Systems Security, which looks like it gives a pretty broad coverage of multiple vendors.
It would certainly be interesting to see how a graduate of the Master of Networking and Systems Administration stacked up in a Google Sysops interview...