Fall '23 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510. In Fall 2023, my name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester, my contact information can be found here. It’s also on the syllabus. It’s also on the cannabis page. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns at all in this class. I also have one teaching assistant this semester, Matt Schwartz, Matt is going to be working with me to help you if you have any questions on the labs, he’s also going to be helping me with doing some of the grading Matt did this class last year, I believe. So he’s pretty familiar with a lot of the content. And he’s going to be working right alongside you to check all the labs for me. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either of us, we’re happy to help. In this course, just like a lot of courses, it’s built with gated modules on canvas. There’s one module due every other week in this class, so please check the due dates very carefully. Each module includes a lab assignment, that lab assignment requires a live grading portion, which means you’ll work with either Matt or myself via zoom, so that we can grade your work, it means that this is a very labor intensive class. So please be aware of that. We’re also going to have some discussions throughout the semester. So you’ll either have a recorded video to watch, or I’ll bring in a guest speaker and you’ll have the opportunity to join a live zoom and speak with one of our guest speakers. And then finally, at the end of the semester, we’ll have a final project.

So for discussion of this course, I’ve set up a channel on the CIS Discord server. So I please encourage you to use discord. One of the early assignments is to go to discord and introduce yourself there so that you can find the channel and make sure you’re in the right place. So please make sure you do that. If you have any questions, personal issues, grading questions, etc. I’ve set up a help email for this class, which is cis527-help. If you’re in any of the case, Dave email systems, if you just type CIS 527 Dash, it should autocomplete email is kind of our official method for communication in this class, Discord is a little bit more flexible. In general, feel free to ask questions on Discord. But if it’s personal stuff, grading stuff, feel free to put that in an email, that cis 527 Help email goes to both Matt and I and whoever is the first one available, we’ll answer that for you as best we can. So success in this course, learning to be a system administrator is difficult. And it is a different way of thinking compared to a lot of the programming that you’ve done. Because there’s simultaneously one way to do things. And there’s also many way to do things in a lot of ways. So to be successful in this course, you really need to come at it with a growth mindset, it’s going to be tricky, you’re going to break stuff, you’re going to run into issues. And so you have to be willing to sit down and try and learn. But I guarantee you, you can learn how to do any of this if you just take the time to do it. The second big thing about being a successful sysadmin is don’t just read or watch content, but engage with it. There’s a lot of content where I’m just going to sit there and go line by line through a config file, or I’m going to discuss some concepts. And if you just read the video, read the text or watch the video and just go oh yeah, I got it. That may not be enough, you may really need to engage with it and follow along and do those examples yourself. So to really see and understand how it’s working. A lot of these labs involve multiple parts. So please work iteratively get one part working, make sure it’s working, then move on to the next part. One of the most frustrating things in this class is when somebody brings me a lab, it’s like, oh, yeah, I tried to do this and it didn’t work. So then I tried to do this and it didn’t work. And so then I tried to do this and it didn’t work. And so they’ve got like three or four broken things in their lab instead of just one that they can focus on. And it’s hard to tell where the error is. The other nice thing is we’re using VMware for all of this. So VMware has a very nice snapshot feature. So just like any other class, save early and save often make yourself snapshots. Anytime you get something working, I always hate that situation where a student breaks a VM. And then they don’t have any snapshots. And they have to start over. And it happens every semester. And I will guarantee it will happen this semester. So make sure you’re making snapshots early and often and using them all the time. It’s just like playing a video game, you’re walking into a boss fight, auto save before you going to the boss fight. The same thing happens in this course. Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for help. There are always situations in this course where something will not work, right or you will do something and it doesn’t work the same on your computer as it does on every other every other computer. Don’t assume that you’re stupid or that you’re having trouble. Please ask for help. It is very easy in this course to back yourself into a corner. And almost every semester there’s a student that has something happened on their system that even I can’t debug. And so don’t sit there and just spin your wheels. If you get stuck and you’re not making progress, ask for help. Let us know Matt and I are here to help. So don’t be afraid to reach out and let us know if you have any questions.

So like I talked about the lab grading this course there are seven labs. Most of them are graded interactively. I think there are two labs that we submit everything online. For the interactive grading, what you’ll do is you’ll schedule a grading time via Calendly, we recommend choosing a 15 or 20 minute time slot, please, for my own sanity, please check the TA schedule first, Matt gets paid to do this hourly. So the more times that he can grade stuff, the more money he makes. So please feel free to check that schedule first and see if you can get on his schedule. If not feel free to get on my schedule, you can schedule your lab time before you’re done with the lab. But the lab grading must happen before the due date. I think most of the labs are due on Friday. And so you should schedule your lab grading time before Friday at 5pm. There are 25 of you in this class, which means if we do for an hour, that still takes six hours, at least, to grade everything. So that’s like I said, it’s very labor intensive to do this class. So please be aware, you may not get that early time if you don’t schedule ahead. The other thing is my Calendly, especially requires anywhere from two to four hours notice. So if you get done with the lab at four o’clock on Friday and want to try and find a grading time between four o’clock and five o’clock on Friday, it’s not going to be there. So please be aware of that schedule your grading times in advance. You when we do grading, we’ll bring it up on Zoom, we’ll have you share your screen pointed at VMware, we will ask you to walk through things in your VMs and show us that it’s working correctly, we may ask you to run commands, we may ask you to show us config files, we may ask you to do certain things. That’s our way of confirming issues, your systems work the way they should. The last thing, once you start grading, you cannot make a change. For example, if you pull up a config file and realize that something is wrong, it’s too late, you can’t make that change. So please make sure that you have everything done before you do any grading. Because once you start that grading process, it is the way it is. And we have to take it as you submit it. We try and be pretty lenient with partial credit, but do your own testing, make sure things are working before you go for lab grading.

So this year, one of the things I want to do, again, is discussions a couple years ago, I brought in some guest speakers. Now I’ve got a big class this semester, I think it’d be fun to do that again. So I’ve got a survey, it’s on the first page of the discussions module, it’s a little when to meet survey, please respond to that survey by Friday, August 25. I’m going to take the most common overlap time or maybe one or two of those and make those into zoom discussion times. On most weeks, I’ll just have them zoom office hours, but a few times throughout the semester, I will try and bring in some guest speakers. In years past I had Seth Galitzer, I got K-State’s CIO, Kyle Hutson to talk about supercomputers. I’ve had a couple of folks from industry that have come in. So it’s a really great chance to learn more about being a system administrator, and all the different ways that that looks out in the real world. And so part of your grade will come from participating in those discussions, you’ll submit some questions beforehand that I can pick from, and then you’ll either participate in the live discussion on Zoom, or you’ll watch the video and write a response afterwards. But it’s a really good way to learn more about system administration in the field itself. So I think this is a really fun part of this class. So that’s really all I’ve got for this first week of announcements. As always, if you have any questions, join the discussion on Discord. I’ll be looking forward to seeing your announcements, your introduction posts there, and I’ll be pretty active on Discord throughout the semester. I also host Tea Time office hours, which are Mondays at 11 o’clock this year, you’ll see some information being posted about that shortly. The Tea Time officers are available on campus in person, but they’re also held on zoom so you can join either way. And then of course, both Matt and I will have some one on one office hours available via Calendly. So you can schedule some time there. But again, bear in mind, there’s 25 of you in this class. It’s a very labor intensive class. So please be mindful and try and do the best you can working with us on Discord and some other things. And then schedule the office hours if you need that time to work with us directly. Because we’re going to be really overloaded trying to keep up with 25 students in this class. So that’s all I got for this semester. I’m rooting for you. Good luck. I hope everything goes well. You’ll probably see me every other week. Usually since this is an every other week class. I usually post announcement videos every other week. So watch for an announcement video probably the day after Labor Day this year. If you have any questions or concerns, let us know otherwise, I look forward to interacting with you on Discord and I will see you in a couple of weeks.

Fall '23 Week 2

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2023. I’ll try and post announcements videos like this about every other week in this class. Usually these announcements videos are pretty informal, so you’ll notice I don’t have my background set up or anything, but it’s just a chance for me to talk through some things that are on my mind, things that I would normally announce at the beginning of class if we were meeting in person. But instead, I think it’s much easier to do these quick videos is.

So first things first, you should be working on lab one and you should be hopefully getting to the point where you’re about ready to get it graded. So what you’ll need to do to get your labs graded is you’ll need to schedule a time slot to meet with either Matt or myself. My preference is that you check Matt’s schedule first. The only reason I say that is because there are 26 of you and there’s only one of me, and I’m currently teaching three classes officially and three classes unofficially. So my schedule is very packed this semester and so I’m really relying on Matt to cover a lot of the grading load, but I’m available as well. So please schedule a time slot. Check matt’s calendar first. If Matt’s times don’t work for you, then check my calendar and pick a time with me. When you’re ready to get graded. Make sure you make snapshots in VMware so that you can roll back to those snapshots if anything breaks. And then when it’s time for grading, please have everything ready. That means have your VMs open, have them up and running. Have files open, whatever we ask you to do so that it goes really quickly. And then just be prepared to demonstrate your work for this first lab. We’re going to ask you to show us a few settings on each of your systems. And we’re going to ask you to run a couple of terminal commands that will show all the file permissions for the docs folders that you made. So be prepared to do some of that. Typically, lab grading only takes about ten minutes per lab if everything thing is working correctly. However, if things are not working correctly, it can take much longer as we try and diagnose problems and look for partial credit. Um. When we’re doing lab grading, we may not work with you long enough to fix those problems. You may want to schedule a follow up time to get some problems fixed, especially in labs three and four where those labs build on each other. This first lab, don’t worry about it. We’re going to delete these VMs as soon as we’re done with them, so don’t worry too much about it. This is just an introductory lab, but be aware that that’s what we’re doing with the lab grading, so let us know if you have any questions on that. But don’t be afraid to schedule your time slot. And to be clear, you can schedule your time slot now, as long as that time slot happens after you get the lab done. So if you want to get graded next Wednesday when it’s due, I believe it’s Tuesday or Wednesday when it’s due, go ahead and schedule the time slot that works for you. It’ll be on our calendars. And then make sure you have the lab done before that time slot. Do not wait until the due date to try and schedule your time slot because A, most of them will be full, and B, most, I believe Matt’s calendar does. And I know my calendar requires anywhere from two to 4 hours prior notice to schedule a time. So be aware of that.

The other thing that I’ve done is I’ve scheduled our weekly discussion times for Thursdays from one to 02:00 p.m.. That was the time slot that worked best for most people in this class and also fits my schedule. So what we’ll be doing with that is I’m going to reach out to a few friends of mine and try and get a few guest speakers to come in during those discussion times to tell you about their jobs in it and what they do. So I’ll be posting a schedule for that very soon. Some of these will be repeats from previous semesters, but I’m also going to try and get a couple of new people if I can find some, so be aware of that. So to earn points for the discussions, you’ll notice that there are five graded discussions throughout the semester. What you’ll do is you’ll submit two questions before the scheduled discussion time. So I will be updating those and posting those as soon as I get the schedule figured out. Then you can either attend the live discussion with our guest speaker Thursday from one to 02:00 P.m. That week. Or if you’re not available, you can watch the video afterwards. Either one. To earn points. If you attend live and participate by asking a question, you’ll get points. If you attend live and don’t ask a question or you watch a video, there will be a short response that I will have you write afterwards. So you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. There are ways to earn points either way, and then for weeks where we don’t have a scheduled guest speaker, I will just use those times as office hours. Matt may also be available during those times, so I will hop in the Zoom session. If you have questions, join us and ask us any questions you have. If nobody shows up after about ten or 15 minutes, I will tend to drop out of the Zoom session. But those are kind of our open office hours times. If you have any questions for us on days that are not scheduled for a guest speaker.

The other big thing in this class if you need any help, there are a couple of different ways I recommend getting help. First and foremost, there’s the CIS 527 help email address that is posted on the Canvas website. That address goes to myself and Matt, so we can both answer those questions very quickly. We’ve also set up an Ed discussion board for this course that you can find on Canvas linked on the side. Ed Discussion is a great place to get questions answered in this class because it’s got a lot of features where we can post code and snippets and things like that. And any of your questions you post can be seen by others in the class. So it’s a great way where we only have to answer a question once, especially if it’s a popular question and someone’s confused on it. If either of those don’t work, you can also schedule a time via calendar with either myself or Matt to get some one on one help. And then of course, you’re also welcome to attend the office hours on Thursdays if we’re not having a guest speaker that week. So that’s all the real updates that I’ve got for this week. Hopefully things are going well with the first lab up. Hopefully by now you’ve gotten access to VMware and you’ve gotten access to the Microsoft Store so you can get VMware installed, get Windows installed. If you haven’t done that, I recommend doing that now. If you have any issues with that, let us know. It may take us a day or so to go through the process to get that fixed. So again, do not wait until the last minute to start on these labs. We really want you to be successful, and that means starting early. So, as always, if you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I will probably post another video next week. Good luck.

Fall '23 Week 3

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the Week Three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2023. So this week lab One is due tomorrow by 07:00 P.m., so make sure you get that done. Remember, for the lab grading, you need to schedule an interactive grading time with either Matt, My, UTA or myself via calendar. Both of our calendars are open. You can schedule a time anytime. However, please bear in mind that most of the time you have to schedule a meeting at least 2 hours in advance. So don’t wait until tomorrow afternoon because we may be all full. And then you’ll have to schedule for Thursday so make sure you get that scheduled ASAP. The lab is due before 07:00 P.m. Just to account for some late stuff in case people schedule for after work. Also, don’t forget that the Week Two quizzes are due next week. So on September 11 on Monday, make sure you get those done. And then lab Two is going to be due on September 20. We’re also shooting on having a discussion around that same time as well and I’ll briefly talk about that.

So the discussion sessions have been set for Thursdays from one to 02:00 p.m.. Most weeks those will just be office hours while I will sit in zoom for a while and answer any questions and that may also be there as well. I have sent out speaker invites to get a few speakers from industry to come in and I’m hoping to schedule our first speaker soon, probably within the next couple of weeks. And so as soon as I get the first few speakers nailed down, I will post that schedule, and then I will update the assignments on canvas, where you can go in and ask a few questions beforehand and then also have the assignment afterwards, where you can get participation credit if you’re not able to attend the live discussion. But for right now, the Thursdays are just office hours, so feel free to drop by anytime if you have any questions on the lab.

So you’re going to start working on lab two. Lab two is basically redoing lab One using Puppet. So what you’re going to do is create two new virtual machines, reinstall the operating system, you’re going to install the Puppet agent and you’re going to make a snapshot. After you’ve done all of that, I highly encourage you to reinstall the operating system and run all of the updates for the operating system, it may take several times in both Windows and Linux to get all of the updates. Then install Puppet and then make your snapshot. It’s really, really important that you remember to make your snapshot at that time before you’ve done any other setup so that you can write your Puppet Manifest and test it and then roll it back to that snapshot. Every semester I have somebody do this lab forget to make that snapshot, and then they ask me if there’s any way to undo it, and I have to tell them, no. You get to reinstall your VMs, so make sure you remember to make that snapshot the Puppet manifest. You’re just making a manifest file to create users files and do a few other things. Try and keep it very simple. In the videos, I show some ways that you can use Puppet Resource to query your system to see what the setup is currently. So, for example, you could manually add some of those users. Use Puppet Resource to see what that looks like and then trim down that output to create the user accounts that you want.

I do have model solutions for these. The model solutions are less than 200 lines of code per operating system. It is possible to create one unified file that works for both operating systems, but in general, I recommend creating one for Ubuntu and one for Windows. They’re going to be similar, but they’ll have some differences, so it makes it a lot easier to keep track. In this lab, you can also use anything from the Puppet Library. There are a couple of times where I show you how to use different library things. If you do use a library from Puppet, make sure you put in comments at the top of your Puppet manifest. What library needs to be installed if you use the Utils Library or Standard Library or the Windows File Permissions Library, anything like that. So make sure you make note of that so that when we’re grading those, we know that we need to install those. And finally, for lab two, the grading for lab two is done offline. So all you have to do is submit your two Puppet Manifest files via Canvas, and then Matt and I will go through and grade those after. The lab is due in a couple of weeks. So you don’t have to schedule a grading time for lab two unless you want to. If you want us to go through it manually, we can definitely do that as well. So that’s really all I’ve got for this week. It’s a pretty short week.

Hopefully things are going well. As always, if you have any questions in this class, you can keep up with us by joining the discussions on Edstem. You can also join Office hours on Thursdays. There’s lots of different ways you can get in touch with both Matt and I. So just let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, I hope things are going well. I know that it kind of feels like you have to do this lab again, but that’s really the point, is to show you the benefit of doing this manually versus the benefit of doing this in puppet. So hopefully things go well with lab two. Let us know if you have any questions and I will see you again in a couple of weeks.

Fall '23 Week 5

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week five announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. This week we got a lot of stuff going on. We’ve got lab two that’s due on Wednesday, so tomorrow you should be getting done with lab two. There’s also the first discussion will be this Thursday, so the questions for our speaker for the first discussion are also due on Wednesday, so make sure you get those posted. Then we go into next Monday. You’ve got lab three quizzes due or due next Monday. Next Wednesday the discussion one responses due if you’re not able to attend a live discussion and then two weeks from now lab three is due and the second discussion questions will be due because our second speaker will be that week. So there’s stuff due every week, sometimes on Monday and Wednesday, so make sure you’re watching your calendar. Hopefully things go really smoothly, but it’s a really good time to keep keeping on your Canvas calendar to make sure you don’t miss anything that is due coming up.

So for lab two grading, all you have to do is submit your puppet manifest files on Canvas. There’s no meeting required, so you don’t have to schedule time with Matt or I. What will happen is Matt will download your files as he’s going through and grading them. He’ll run them on his VM. Basically what he’ll do is he’ll start at a snapshot that’s just what you should have for your assignment. He’ll run your manifest file, reboot, run your manifest file again, and then check to make sure it did everything correctly. We have to do the reboot so that all of your group permissions get applied properly, and it’s also a way to check to make sure that on Windows it doesn’t keep reinstalling some of the system, some of like Firefox and Thunderbird. It shouldn’t reinstall those. It should just see that they’re installed every time. So lab two grading, you don’t need to meet with anybody. Probably what I’ll do is on Thursday, anybody that’s already submitted lab two, I will go through and give you one point on that lab that will unlock the model solutions and also unlock access so you can get started on lab three because you want to go through that pretty quickly.

So our speaker for this coming week is Kyle Hudson. Kyle Hudson works at Kanren, which is the Internet Service Provider for K -State and other research. institutions in the state of Kansas. Kyle was formerly one of the folks that worked with Beocat. So he’s worked with us a lot. He’s spoken in the class before about his Beocat experience. But now I’m really excited to hear about his new job working at Kanren. Kyle will be here speaking Thursday at 1pm via Zoom in our usual Zoom meeting time. So remember to get points for the discussion, you have two options. You can either attend live and ask at least one question of the speaker or you can watch it either live or recorded and then you’ll be able to write a quick response. I’ll post the response prompt shortly after the speaker. So you’ll be able to work on that. And remember that’s Thursday at 1pm. Your questions are due Wednesday night.

So you’ll be going into Lab 3. Lab 3 in this class goes over core networking services. So we’re gonna set up our own little network in VMware. We’re gonna set our IP addresses. We’re gonna install a DNS and DHCP server and configure those. We’re going to an install an SNMP server and learn how to work with that. We’re gonna use tools like Wireshark to explore some network packets. Lots of stuff are going on in Lab 3. Lab 3 is probably the second hardest lab in this class. It’s a lot of new content if you’ve never worked with networking stuff before. In the textbook, there are some hints and some diagrams. So make sure you take a look at those. I show some pretty good examples of how to do debugging on DNS, for example. And of course, if nothing else, if you’re stuck, please ask questions. This is one of those labs you should start on very, very early and start working on a little bit at a time. Try and do one service at a time. So get DNS working, then get DHCP working, then get SNMP working. Make snapshots in VMware, snapshots are your friend. But if you get stuck, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Schedule a meeting, come to office hours. We’re happy to help. So that’s really it. Other than that, you can keep in touch either by posting on ed discussion or emailing us or joining the discussions Thursday at one o ‘clock.

After Kyle’s done, I’ll stick around and answer any questions if you have any. You can always schedule a one -on -one office hours with either myself or Matt using our Calendly links. We’re always here to help. So hopefully things are going well. Hopefully you’re able to get up and networking this week. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, best of luck and I look forward to seeing you at the discussion on Thursday.

Fall '23 Week 8

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week eight announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. So this week you should be wrapping up the second discussion. We had Adam come in and talk about his work on Beocat. So hopefully you’re getting a response put together for that. Also due tomorrow are the quizzes for Lab 4, so hopefully you’re getting those done. And then next week by Wednesday Lab 4 is due, so hopefully you’re able to get started working on that. So some quick hints real quick about success in this course because I get asked this question every once in a while. Things that you can do to be really successful in this course is to read the lab assignments very, very carefully. There’s a lot of information in there, but there’s also a lot of hints in there about ways to do things or pitfalls we’ve run into. Those red and green and blue boxes are things that I’ve added in over the years that I think are very helpful. The linked documentation is also very helpful. A lot of times the work you’re trying to do in the lab can be accomplished by following that first or second documentation link and following the steps there. I try and post them in the order of relevance, so most likely start with the first one. It will probably answer most of your questions. But if you do get stuck in this class, if you’re not making forward progress after about an hour or if something breaks and you can’t figure it out, that is a great time to take a stop and ask questions. There’s a lot of things both Matt and I know how to help you with that it’s just impossible for us to explain in the class. For example, things like how to check your system log, how to restart services and look for bugs and how to look at these config files and see what’s going on. Especially with Lab 4, you have to be diagnosing network issues and also looking at domain issues and trying to get your certificates to work. There’s a lot of intricacy in Lab 4. If you get stuck, don’t spin your wheels. Please come talk to us. We’ve got a lot of time. Matt will be having office hours on Thursday during the one o ‘clock time. I should be there as well for a little while. Hopefully, you can use some of these tips to be successful in this course.

For Lab 4, we’re going to start working on authentication. For Lab 4, you’re going to be working on authentication. to create a new virtual machine using Windows Server. Windows Server is kind of a fat VM, so beware. It does require a lot of RAM and quite a bit of storage space, so hopefully that works out for you. What you’re going to do in Windows Server is you’re going to create an Active Directory domain, which is the default standard for what most systems use for this. K -State CS, even though we’re a Linux system, actually uses Active Directory as K -State does as well. On the Linux side, you’re going to create an open LDAP server, which is kind of the Linux open source equivalent of this. And then for each one, you’re going to configure a client that connects to those systems. And you’re also going to configure a little of interoperability, where you have an Ubuntu client that logs in using an Active Directory domain on Windows. As before, the biggest thing I can tell you in this lab is to make snapshots. Some of the times that are really useful to make snapshots are on your Windows Server before you promote it to an Active Directory domain controller. That process fails maybe one out of 20 times. And so every semester, there’s at least one student where that process fails. Just go back to your snapshot and try again. Same thing with OpenLDAP, the process that usually fails is adding the TLS certificate to the LDAP server. So make a snapshot before you start that process. Thankfully, the process is mostly just following the instructions and mimicking the commands from the guide. But if you screw something up, it’s much easier to roll back and try again, then to try and figure out what happened and debug it and undo it. So use the snapshots very wisely as much as you can in Lab 4.

Once you get done with Lab 4, you’re welcome to push right ahead and go to Lab 5. Lab 5, we’re going to shift gears and we’re going to work in the Cloud for this lab. So you’re going to create a couple of Cloud resources. In most cases, these will be droplets on DigitalOcean. You can use other Cloud providers if you would like. I have had a couple of students do these labs on AWS. I haven’t had anybody try to do them on Azure yet. I really recommend DigitalOcean. It’s the system I’m familiar with and so for debugging and things, it’s the one that I’d be most able to help you with. So you create a couple of Cloud resources, you’re configure SSH in your firewall, set up some virtual hosts in Apache, and then we’re also going to start working with Docker. And so we’re going to set up a couple of Docker containers with reverse proxy so that you can see what that looks like as well. It’s really, really fun. So as always, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord. We’ve got the ed discussion board that you can chat with. You can schedule one -on -one office hours. We’ve got our usual office hour on Thursday. I’m working on trying to schedule a couple more guest speakers. It’s just got to try and work in their schedule, but I’m going to try and get Seth Galitzer if I can. I’ll try and get somebody from K -State Central IT if I can, and I’m going to try and get somebody from industry. So I’ll be reaching out and making some of those connections and trying to schedule those over the next few weeks.

Quick punch in here because I forgot to record this slide earlier. I have a couple of days of upcoming travel coming up this week. I will be out of the office most of Thursday through Sunday this week and also Thursday through Sunday of next week. Because of that, my response is maybe a little bit delayed and if you need any grading done by me, it may be a little delayed as well. Match should be available, so you’re more than welcome to schedule with him during those times. times. If you need any help, please don’t email me directly. Make sure you email the CIS 527 Help email address or post on ed discussion. That message goes to both myself and to Matt. So Matt will be able to jump in and help you out with things. But just making you aware that I’ve got some upcoming travel, which means I’ll be gone Thursday through Sunday the next couple weeks. So if you email me or try and contact me on either Thursday or Friday of those weeks, it might be Monday or Tuesday of the following week before I came back to you. So just bear that in mind. I’ve got a couple of days where I’m going to be gone. So hopefully that doesn’t cause any concerns. And if you need anything during those times, Matt should be able to help you out as well.

So it’s week eight. We’re finally at the halfway mark of the semester. Hopefully things are going well and you’re rolling into lab four with a lot of confidence. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know or talk to Matt. He’s also really more than capable of helping you out. So best of luck on lab four. Lab four is probably one of the more difficult labs in this class. So I hope it goes well. But as always if you have any questions let us know and I will see you again in a couple weeks

Fall '23 Week 9

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. This week Lab 4 is due tomorrow, so make sure you’re getting Lab 4 all wrapped up. Then you should also be starting on the content for Lab 5, which is some introduction to the cloud. And then a couple weeks from now you’ll have the Lab 5 content that’s actually due, so you should get started on Lab 5 sometime next week. So for grading on Lab 4, basically we want to see a few simple things. We want to see your Windows Server up and running with an Active Directory installed and a static IP address. We want to see that you’ve created a user and group and Active Directory, and we want to show that you’ve connected a Windows client to that Active Directory. Then we’ll shift over to Linux. We want to see that you’ve installed Open LDAP and you’ve created a user and group using LDAP Account Manager. I posted an announcements video yesterday with a video showing you how to install LDAP Account Manager, so hopefully that helps. I apologize for the bad audio quality on that video. It was recorded on my laptop, which doesn’t have a good microphone. I will re -record a more professional version of that video in the future. And then we want to see you have an Ubuntu client that logs into LDAP using the LDAP client. We also want to have an Ubuntu that logs into your Active Directory. Those could be two different VMs, two different snapshots of the same VM. It’s up to you how you want to handle that. But that’s really all we want to see with Lab 4. If everything’s working, it takes very little time to show us that it’s working. If you have trouble, feel free to work with Matt or I, and we’d be happy to help you debug it. We’re slowly getting better with debugging problems with Lab 4.

So some quick reminders to be successful in this class. Make sure you read the assignments very carefully. Take a look at any posted diagrams or resources that I have. A lot of those resources have good steps, tutorials. Generally, I try and post them in the order of usefulness. So typically the top one that I post is the one that you’re most interested in on the assignments. But if you’re stuck, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to come to office hours. The big thing is don’t spin your wheels. Don’t feel like you just keep working in a rut. If you’ve been working on something, just keep working on it. for half hour and can’t figure it out. Come talk to us, let us know. We’ve got some pretty good background in debugging and can do a lot to help you figure out what’s going on. So feel free to reach out.

So this week you should be moving on to Lab 5. Lab 5, we’re going to shift over to doing some stuff in the cloud for Lab. We won’t use the VMs for this lab, but you’ll still need them for Lab 6 and 7, so hold onto those. If you’re running out of storage space, let me know or let Matt know. We’ve got some tips we can give you to help resolve some of that. Basically what you’re going to do is set up two droplets on DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure. If you have experience with AWS and Azure, you’re welcome to work there. I don’t have a lot of experience with that or debugging anything there, so I really recommend DigitalOcean if possible, but you’re welcome to do something else. Just understand if it breaks, I may not be able to help you fix it and I may ask you to move to DigitalOcean. You’re going to set up an SSH in firewall, you’re going to configure the Apache web server and some simple websites on Apache. You’ll set up a working DNS name, and then we’re going to do a little bit with… Docker and you’ll set up a Docker reverse proxy to two different Docker containers just to get a little bit of experience working with Docker in lab five So one thing you can do is if you don’t have any access to digital ocean yet You can either register for the github education pack at this URL You can also go to try that digital ocean comm slash free trial offer. I apologize that got cut off Usually digital ocean has an offer where you can get anywhere from 100 to 200 dollars in free credit with a new account Same thing for name cheap dot me you can get a dot me domain for 99 cents If you need credits on digital ocean, let me know I’ve got referral credits. I can give you as well Overall for this class the total cost you should spend on this is about 11 dollars. It’s pretty cheap I think it’s it’s reasonable to do this on your own But most of these you can get for free or for 99 cents So hopefully it works should work out but at most you should pay no more than 11 dollars to complete some of this stuff

So finally a quick reminder, I’ve got some upcoming travel this week I’ll be out of the office Thursday through Sunday of this week because that responses be email and grading may be a bit delayed Matt is still available so you can reach out to Matt anytime if you have questions Please make sure you use the CIS 527 help email address that’s on the canvas page or post an ed discussion Those go to both Matt and I so we can help you out there Finally, of course, there’s opportunities to keep in touch. We have a discussion on discord. We have ed discussion boards We have time for one -on -one office hours Matt should be at the Thursday office hour time as well if you’d like to meet within there I’m working on scheduling the next discussions. Unfortunately. I’ve had to reschedule a couple of things So I’ll be working on that soon We’ll try and have at least two more discussions this semester My goal is to have three more but we’ll see if we can fit that all into the schedule But those will be getting posted very shortly as well So we’re getting up to the cloud It always reminds you of this great XKCD comic where the cloud is just somebody else’s computer I think this really describes it quite well. So if you haven’t seen this comic take a look at this XKCD comic I hope everything goes well with lab 5 if you have any questions, let us know and I will talk to you again in a couple weeks Good luck

Fall '23 Week 12

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the Week 12 announcements video for CIS 527 in Fall 2023. As you can tell, I’ve been a little under the weather, so my voice is a little rough. I apologize for that. This week we’ve got a discussion three coming up with Sarah Allen. She’ll be here next Thursday, so please make sure you mark that on your calendar. You’ve got until next Wednesday to come up with a couple of questions. You’d like to ask Sarah based on her experience working as a system administrator for McCown -Gordon. After her presentation, you’ll have a couple of weeks to work on a response if you weren’t able to attend in person. Lab 6, the quizzes are due this week and then Lab 6 is due next week. Lab 6 is kind of one of the big wrap -up labs where we talk about big things like file servers, mapping drives to those file servers, creating application servers, and building some working web applications. It’s like three or four different things that we all do in different ways, but this uses all your VMs and your digital ocean droplets as well.

One thing that’s coming up in this class is a final project. The final project is something that you get to propose, either building something or fixing something. The whole idea is you’re not actually going to do the project, but instead what I want you to go through is the process of proposing it and scoping out the idea and then doing a SWOT analysis, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of that idea. Then at the end you’ll come to a conclusion whether it’s a good idea or not. This is mostly a thought exercise. It doesn’t have to be something that you can actually do, but it should be something that is realistic that you can accomplish using your skills. You can build a new network, you can fix a web app, you can develop a new web resource for a startup like a website or a store, you can set up laptops for a school or maybe even a lab at a school, you can design central authentication or a file server for a company, you can discuss using thin clients versus thick clients and labs, you can discuss using on -prem versus in -the -cloud computing, lots and lots of different things. Basically propose a scenario, give me the parameters of your scenario, are you working with a company, a school, your home, whatever, design the idea, do a SWOT analysis. It’s very open -ended. It’s really anything that you want to do, chat with me if you need help finding ideas. One part of the final project is you need to do some sort of a small demo for the project. Don’t spend more than a couple hours on it. I really just want you to get your feet wet with a new idea or a new technology or something we haven’t played around with yet as part of your final project.

So as we’re working on stuff, don’t forget to look at the GitHub Education Pack. You can go to DigitalOcean for a free trial offer. If you haven’t done that yet for Lab 5, there’s also Namecheap .me. If you need a domain name, anything like that. Otherwise, hopefully things are going well. Please feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions. We’ve got office hours. Watch the deadlines on Canvas. The proposal for your final project is due December 1st. And then the actual final project is due December 15th. What you’ll turn in for the final project is a 7 to 15 minute video of you discussing your project and you’ll turn in your write -up. That’s really all you have to do. It’s pretty simple. You can record the video using Zoom or OBS or any other tool that you prefer. I would like to see you on camera as you talk through things. I think that’s really important. But if you have any questions or concerns, let me know. Otherwise, we are nearing the end of the semester. We’re on week 12 of 16, so hopefully things are going well. We’ve just got a couple more weeks before Thanksgiving breaks. So keep up the good work, work warily hard on lab six, and let me know if you have any questions. Good luck.