Fall '24 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello everyone and welcome to the week one announcements video for CIS 527 and CC fall 10 in fall 2024. So as you probably saw in the introduction video my name is Russ Feldhausen my contact information is here you can find it on Canvas you can find it on the syllabus. I’m really excited to be teaching this class I think this is my eighth time teaching the system administration class. It’s a really fun class it’s one of the most valuable classes that I get to teach at K -State and I’m really excited to be working through it with you. Every week I’m going to do an announcements video maybe every week maybe every other week it’s generally unscripted it’s me talking through everything that’s in my head so you’re gonna see a much different version of me in these announcements videos versus what you see in the videos for the class.

So for this semester I have one teaching assistant Josh Barron. Josh Barron is a GTA that’s working with me he is new to this class but he’s really excited to be catching up and learning with all of you all. He’ll be handling a lot of the questions and grading in this class and then I’ll also be available to answer questions help with grading whatever we can do. We have a pretty big class this semester I think I have 32 enrolled right now which is the largest version of this class I’ve had in several years so it will take a little bit of getting used to as we get used to the scale and taking care of all the grading so just bear with us as we get started on that.

So like I talked about in the introduction with this course there are seven modules in the course plus the final project it’s a 16 week semester so you’re going to do one module every other week. I generally recommend that you start on the modules as soon as they’re available because really some of these lab assignments may take you a couple weeks to get done. The one thing that I have seen students do in this class that causes them to fail is wait to start the lab assignment until the weekend before it’s due and then they get stuck and then it takes them time to get help and sometimes it takes multiple times to get help and then they’re two or three days late and they sacrifice 30 or 40 percent of their grade on the lab because they started two days before it was due. So I encourage you to start your labs early and check the due dates and put them on your calendar. In most chapters I have the lab assignment right up front so you can start working on the lab as you go through the of the content. You don’t have to read and watch everything before you can start on the lab. I do recommend reading the entire lab assignment before you start on it, but generally you can get started as soon as you get to a new module.

For the lab assignments, what we’re going to do is live grading. It’s the best way I’ve come up with to grade this course. So generally what happens is you’ll schedule a time on Calendly with either Josh is preferred, if his calendars fold and you’ll schedule on my calendar. I do that to protect my time, but also because I’m paying for 20 hours of Josh’s time and I want to make sure we use up Josh’s time more effectively than using up my time because I’m actually bouncing between about four different classes this semester. So you schedule a time to grade, you’ll get a Zoom link in that scheduled calendar invite. And so you’ll join the Zoom, you’ll share your screen, and then either Josh or I will talk you through some things that we want you to demonstrate. In general, you should be prepared to demonstrate everything that you did on the lab. So if we ask you, show us where the users are, you should know where to go and show us what users you set up. If we ask you to confirm that your DNS server works by querying these few things, you should know how to query your DNS server. We shouldn’t have to tell you the commands to do that. We’ll prepare to do that if we have to, but really it’s a demonstration of your ability and understanding of the system. So not only do you have to set it up and have it working, but we expect you to know how to use it so that when we ask you to demonstrate things during the lab, you should be able to go, oh yeah, I know how to do that and get it figured out. So be prepared for that.

We’re also gonna have some live discussions throughout the semester. The plan for the live discussions is to bring in a industry person or some sort of other person and have them talk about their experiences with system administration. I can tell you the first one is most likely going to be Seth Galitzer, our computer science system administration here, system administrator for computer science. I’m probably gonna try and get somebody from Bayocat. I’ll probably try and get Kyle Hudson, who used to be a Bayocat, and then was a Canran, and now he’s moved on to some high -performance computing stuff in industry, which is really cool. And then generally I try and get somebody from larger industry and I try and get somebody from more administration side of things like CIO, CEO type roles. So I’m working on scheduling those and we’ll get those figured out soon. So just keep your eyes open for that.

So for communication in this course, like I talked about, the best thing to do is to post in the Ed discussion board. Ed discussion allows you to post questions. In general, I recommend posting the questions openly and publicly so that everybody can see them and answer them. I know that that’s asking a lot, especially because you may not want to ask that question publicly due to imposter syndrome, but it’s okay. If you have that question, probably everybody else in the class does too. But if you’re concerned about that, you can post a question anonymously so that other students won’t be able to see who you are. Full disclosure, Josh and I will know who you are. but it won’t be public to anybody else. Or you can post a question privately just to Josh and myself and we’ll answer it there. But we do reserve the right to copy paste your question and anonymize it and post it publicly if we think other people should see it. So just be aware of that. Outside of that, you can email us, if you have any personal issues, grading issues, to -dos, things like that. The help email address, CIS527 -help. If you type it in in web mail, it should auto complete. But if not, you need to use the full email address here on the slide. That goes to just Josh and myself. It’s a great way for us to keep track of stuff. Please email that help email address instead of emailing us individually. That way if one of us is not available, the other one might be able to respond very quickly. So I tell people email is official and discussion is much more flexible and that’s why we like to use it in this course.

So how do you succeed in the system administration course? This course is notoriously difficult. I’m not gonna lie. System administration requires a growth mindset. I’m going to give you a lot of lab assignments. that are purposefully vague. It’s not meant to be vague, but it’s meant to represent what you’re going to get in industry. Thankfully, I give you pretty direct ideas of where I want you to go, but some of the lab assignments might say things like, set up an Active Directory, it needs to have this Active Directory domain and these users. What I don’t tell you is these steps to actually do that. However, you’re going to have a lot of videos where I’m going to walk through some of those steps, and there are tons and tons of links to documentation and discussions for how to do this. And so the real key to success in this class is having a growth mindset and understanding that I’m giving you the framework to work within, but you may have to do some of your own reading and your own research outside of my textbook to really figure things out. And so that’s why I tell people, don’t just read the content or watch the videos, but try and engage with it. Try and follow along as best you can. And especially on the lab assignments and on a lot of my pages, click the links. For example, on like lab assignment three, I tell you set up a DNS server, and then right below that are three or four links to the documentation that I read when I set up a DNS server. And so I’m really trying to point you at these other resources to show how people are going to do this in industry and what kind of resources are available. So please, please click the links that are available. In this class, there are something like 300 links to other content. It’s a pain in the butt every semester to go through and review those because the links constantly get changed but I do the best I can to keep them up to date. If you find a broken link, let me know. You can get some bug bounty points for that.

Other big thing I tell you in this class is to work iteratively and save early and often. Try and do a little bit of a lab at a time. Don’t try and do like all five things at once. Try and pick one task and get it mostly working before we move on to the next one. And take advantage of the fact that the virtual machine software we’re using, VMware allows you to make snapshots. For any of you that play video games, it’s like a quick save. Anytime you think you’re going to do something that might break, you might wanna make a snapshot. before you do that. Especially when you get to some of the later labs, every semester it happens at least once. I have somebody that sets up a computer and then either sets up an LDAP server or an Active Directory server and the setup fails. Sometimes it fails through no fault of your own, it just happens. And then they ask me how to fix it. And I tell them, unless you have a snapshot, the only way to fix it is to wipe your machine, reinstall the operating system and try again. And usually they only do that once and then they remember to make a snapshot. But I’m warning you now, that happens every semester. So make snapshots early, make snapshots often and especially make snapshots when I tell you to in the labs.

And then the other big thing to be successful in this class is to ask for help. This class is not designed for anybody to be able to breeze right through it without asking for help. That’s totally an intent of this course. Is I… I definitely know that almost everybody’s gonna get stuck. Something’s gonna be vague. You’re gonna misinterpret something, something won’t work right, whatever. It’s really, really easy to run into problems like that. And I see students all the time that spend six or seven hours trying to solve a problem that turns out that they don’t have the capability to solve or it may not even be solvable. And so I really hate seeing students do that and then they get discouraged and frustrated with the course. I don’t want that. And so instead what I tell you to do is if you’ve been stuck on a problem or you’re not making any forward progress for about a half hour on whatever task you’re working on, that’s a great time to stop and ask for help. You should be able to constantly make forward progress. You may take a few steps back at times, but if you’re stuck debugging a problem and you haven’t figured it out for a half hour or so, take a step away, ask for help, get on our office hours list, post an ed discussion, whatever, and just kind of step away and let it sit for a while. Sometimes you’ll figure it out on your own. Sometimes we’ll figure it out when we get to you. But the worst thing you can do is sit there and be frustrated and trying to just continually spin your wheels and solve a problem. That doesn’t really work in this class. So don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Josh is here. Anybody that’s ever taken this course will tell you that the best thing you can do is take a break and ask for help. I’m usually very willing to sit down and help and solve problems, answer questions, anything that you need to be successful.

So I talked a lot about the lab grading already, but just as a quick reminder, schedule on Calendly. Check Josh’s schedule first. I want you to schedule with him if at all possible. I’m kind of the backup person to schedule grading. And then we’ll set up a Zoom. The other big thing to remember is generally our Calendly calendars require you to schedule four hours in advance. So don’t look at my calendar at three o ‘clock on a Friday expecting to find that four o ‘clock slot open because it does not allow you to schedule times within four hours. Also, the four o ‘clock slot on Friday is almost always taken early in the week because somebody got there on Monday to schedule that time on Friday. So. The other big thing to be clear about lab grading, you need to not only schedule your grading time, but your grading time needs to happen before the due date. In years past, I’ve had people schedule a time on Friday for some time next Tuesday and think that that’s allowed. But no, the grading meeting, the appointment has to happen before the due date. So you really have to think ahead on this. The last thing on the lab grading is once you have started the grading process, and generally Josh and I will both ask you to confirm, are you ready to start? Do you have any questions before we begin? As soon as you start the lab grading process, you cannot make any changes to your lab. If we see something is wrong, even if you immediately notice that it’s wrong and try and fix it, it will be counted wrong. We have to kind of freeze your lab where it is when you start the grading process. So just be aware of that.

I also talked about the discussions a little bit. I’m gonna be sending out a survey here in the next few days that we’ll try and figure out what time of the week works best for everybody. Once I get at least a plurality of times that are available. We’ll schedule it online via Zoom. I’ll start getting people on the schedule itself. For the discussions, the way this works is you’re going to submit some questions before the discussion starts. And then during the discussion, you can either participate in the discussion by asking some of your questions or you can write a response afterwards. There is a little module in Canvas that explains all this, but it’s pretty easy to do.

So that’s really all I’ve got this week. This is probably gonna be the longest announcement video that you’re gonna get throughout the semester. I’ll try and do these, like I said, about every week, every other week or so, just to let you know what’s on my mind or if there’s anything going on. As of right now, modules one through four are posted and tested. The other big thing with the modules in this class is I have a couple of disclaimers in there. The version of this class you’re going through was originally written for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20. Obviously those are old at this point. And so I’m redoing everything for Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24, all of the labs have been tested with those versions of software. Not all of the videos are going to get recorded this time. And so a lot of the older videos are perfectly applicable. It all works or it’s very similar in the current systems. But if you see a video that looks like completely out of whack and wrong, let me know, I’ll put it in as a bug bounty. I may rerecord some quick videos if I need to go through and fix anything. But just be aware that a lot of the documentation and a lot of the textbook is gonna refer to Ubuntu 20 and Windows 10, it may even refer to Ubuntu 18 in a few places. We’re gonna be using the latest and greatest in Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24. So just be aware of that.

So throughout the semester, if you wanna keep in touch, we’ve got a discussion that’s a great place to chat with me there. I’m also on the Discord server and on Microsoft Teams and I will chat with you there as well. Email is always available, the CIS 527 help address is there. The other things you can do every Mondays, I host Tea Time Office Hours with David and Virgo in the computer science department. It’s available via Zoom, it’s also available in person. I believe we’re gonna be in one of the classrooms this year. I think we’re in 11, 17, but I’m not sure. Those are Monday afternoons at one o ‘clock so you can come join us there and hang out. Or you can schedule one or more office hours either with myself or with Josh anytime you need help in this class. So feel free to keep in touch. Other than that, good luck this semester. I hope everything goes well and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks on the next announcements video. Good luck.

Fall '24 Week 2

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the Week 2 Announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in Fall 2024. So this week you should be getting ready to have your first lab grading scheduled. So what you need to do to get your labs graded is schedule a time slot to meet with either Josh or myself. Sometime via Zoom before that lab is due. Remember not only do you have to schedule your grading time but the grade time has to happen before the deadline. We have some students that are unclear that they just have to schedule the lab grading and then they can get it graded after the deadline. The grading actually has to happen before the deadline.

So when you schedule your time slot you’ll go to the home page on Canvas. You’ll scroll down a little bit and you’ll find the instructions for this. What I’d like you to do is check Josh’s calendar first and schedule a time with Josh if he’s available during a time you’re available. If his calendar is full or any of his times don’t work for you then you can schedule with me. We just do that so that Josh’s time gets used up most efficiently and then you can take up my time as needed. When you schedule our meetings by default are only 15 minutes long so we kind of depend on you to come prepared. And so that means that you should have everything ready to go have your VMs both booted have everything pulled up. You can even look at the lab a little bit and figure out what things we’re going to want to look at. There’s some lab grading checklists out there. So do the best you can have everything ready to go so that we can just click through it. If everything is ready it should only take a few minutes to grade. But if you have trouble or you don’t have your lab started up sometimes that can take a long time.

But basically be prepared to demonstrate your work. We will ask you to show us things that you did in the lab. We may not exactly tell you how to do them. So you need to be prepared to demonstrate your work and your understanding. So if we ask you to show us where all the users are at and prove to us that you created the users you’re supposed to. You should be able to find a place where you can show us that and prove that some of the times we will just give you some commands. For example on Linux we may just give you some terminal commands to check things just because that’s a lot quicker. So we’ll work with you on that. If you have any questions or concerns about the lab grading let us know. pretty straightforward, but you just have to kind of try it once and you’ll see what it looks like.

So for the discussions, I sent out a when to meet poll on the announcements earlier last week. So please check that out and fill that out if you can. I’ll try and get the discussion scheduled later this week. And then the full schedule of speakers is coming soon. We’ll try and have our first discussion here in early September. I try to get between three to five guest speakers each semester. So the schedule will be coming very soon. Remember for the discussions to get full credit for those, you need to submit two questions on Canvas before the discussion starts. And then you can either attend the live discussion session on Zoom or you can watch the video afterward and write a small response to that video just to show that you watched it. And then outside of that, whenever we don’t have a guest speaker, we’ll use that discussion time as live office hours where I will hang out in Zoom for a little while if you have any questions there.

So, as a quick reminder in this class, you can get help a couple of ways. One of the best things to do is email the cis527-help email address. That email goes to both myself and Josh so that either of us can answer that email very quickly. If you email one or the other of us directly and we’re busy, it may take a little bit longer to get an answer. So, please remember to use that help email if you can. Another great place to ask for help is a discussion. Josh and I have both been very active on the discussion answering questions there. So, please check that out. And then if you need to meet with us one -on -one for office hours, we have Calendly links available for office hours and grading. So, you can always use Calendly. Hopefully, everything’s going well this semester. We’ve kind of made the change from Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22 to Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24. I think that’s been mostly a smooth transition so far, but there are some little questions coming in. So, if you’re running the issues, check ed discussion, see if we’ve talked about your issues before. And if not, feel free to make a post there and we’ll try and answer it. Josh and I are on top of things. We’ve got our model solutions ready to go so we can check things out if you run into something strange. But otherwise, hopefully lab grading this week goes well and let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, I will see you in another announcements video next week. Good luck.

Fall '24 Week 3

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So this week lab one is due tomorrow on Wednesday by 7 p .m. so make sure you’re working on getting that completed and don’t forget to schedule a grading time either with myself or with Josh to get that graded. I know my calendar is pretty limited today and tomorrow because of a lot of meetings and I’m on campus tomorrow due to the Labor Day holiday so if you have trouble finding a grading time let us know and we’ll work with you on that. Generally for the first lab I’m pretty lenient on late penalties as long as you get a grading time scheduled before it’s due and if we have trouble with that let us know. I’m also working with Josh that we may adjust the day of the week that labs are due just to better fit our schedule. It seems like a lot of my meetings tend to have been on the first part of the week so we may move the due dates a little bit just to make more room for that. So make sure you’re getting lab one done. The quizzes for module two are due next week so make sure you’re getting those started and our first discussion prompt is actually on next week on Wednesday September 11th. We’ll talk about that in just a second and then September the 18th is when lab two is due.

So the discussion sessions I sent out a quick announcement those are going to be Wednesdays from 2 .30 to 3 .30 not this week starting next week on September 11th because of this week I’m on campus on Wednesday. Normally we’ll just do office hours during those but three to five times throughout the semester I’m going to bring in a guest speaker to talk with us. Our first speaker is on September 11th and I’ll be posting information about that guest speaker and it’ll give you a chance to actually write some questions to ask our guest speaker. I’ll probably announce his name in next week’s video but it’s going to be Kyle Hutson so I’m going to get some information from Kyle and I will post that out in an announcement so you can write some questions for Kyle and have those submitted before our discussion session.

So after this week you’re going to start working on lab two. Lab two is basically a redo of lab one but this time instead of manually installing everything and setting it up you’re going to script it using a scripting tool called puppet. Puppet along with Ansible and Chef and SaltStack and some of these other tools are really great for defining a configuration in code and then applying it to an operating system. So what you’ll do for Lab2 is you’ll create two brand new VMs. You’re not going to reuse your VMs from Lab1. You’ll reinstall the operating system, you’ll install Puppet and Updates, and then as soon as you get Puppet installed, you’ll make a snapshot. And then what you’ll do is you’ll write a Puppet manifest file, you’ll test it on your VM, and then you’ll roll back to that snapshot and try it again. Make sure you keep in mind where your manifest file is. If you’ve been working in your VM with your manifest, make sure you copy it out of your VM before you roll back to your snapshot. Every year I have somebody lose a Puppet manifest file because they rolled back a snapshot and it disappears. So make sure you’re careful there. The other big thing with Puppet manifests is keep it simple. Try and use the Puppet resource command that I show you in several of the labs to query information. And it only sets the things that you care about. For example, if you use Puppet resource to query a user, you might get 30 or 40 things. Most of those are defaults you don’t need to set. you only need to grab the few things that actually need to be set when you’re defining that resource. So you don’t have to be exhaustive about defining these. And so because of that, a model solution for this is less than 200 lines of code each. The other thing to be clear about this, you can make two separate manifest files, one for Ubuntu and one for Windows. You don’t have to make a combined manifest. You totally can if you want, but most students choose to do separate manifest files. So make sure you read those pretty closely. And I’ve got some tips and tricks as well. So hopefully you can get through lab two.

All right, other big thing in this class, I really want you to come at this class with a growth mindset. This is a 500 level technical course. And because of that, it requires you as a student to be up to the challenge and be willing to come at it with a growth mindset. And so what I want you to kind of keep in mind is the labs that I set in this class are meant to be challenging. They are meant to be things that you’ve never done before. And specifically a lot of the labs, I do not give you all of the instructions to do the labs. Especially in system administration, if I give you all of the instructions to do, then this entire class just becomes following along with the things I tell you to click on. There’s no learning that happens. And so I set these challenging labs and then it’s up to you to read the documentation, go through my videos and things and understand what I’m asking you to do and then do that action yourself. So it requires you to grow and change a little bit as a student, as you’re learning how to do these things. I’m not just going to tell you how to do things. If you are stuck, however, feel free to ask for clarification. I’ve told several students that I do not expect anybody to pass this class without asking a question at least once. Unless you have a background in system administration, it is very likely I’m going to say something that you don’t understand. And so that’s a chance to come to me or to Josh and ask for clarification. The other big thing on these labs that I will tell you helps a lot is to start early and work methodically. I heard from a lot of students over the weekend that just started working on the labs on Saturday and Sunday and that’s going to make it really difficult to succeed in this class if you start the weekend. before the labs are due. So start early, work methodically, try and work a little bit every day. And of course, the big thing is make snapshots. If you play video games, you can understand the quality of having a lot of auto saves. Feel free to do the same thing with your snapshots. If you run out of disk space, don’t forget, you can go back and delete older snapshots that you’re not gonna roll back to. That will help save some disk space on your system. So hopefully that helps.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got great discussions on EdSTEM. I’ve got office hours. I’m available on Zoom anytime. I’m also available via email and on Teams and on Discord. So lots of opportunities to get help. So feel free to reach out and keep in touch. If you do chat with me on either Teams or Discord, feel free to just at me so that I see the notification pop up. That way I actually see it quickly and can get to you. So, other than that, hopefully you’re looking forward to doing Lab 2. I know it feels like you’re having to do Lab 1 again, but that’s really what we kind of want to get across in this lab, is that you can automate a lot of the things that we used to do manually in system administration, and so that’s what we’re going to play with. Hopefully Lab 2 goes well. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, good luck, and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 4

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week four announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So this week you should be working on the discussion questions for our first discussion this Wednesday, which will be hosted by Kyle Hutson. I’ll talk about him in just a second. Those questions are due about an hour before the session starts so that I can go through them, but you’re invited to attend live in person so you can see his presentation and ask him questions via Zoom and get your response points there as well. Next week lab two is due on Wednesday so make sure you’re working on lab two to get that done soon and then next Wednesday the response for discussion one is also going to be due.

So for lab two to clarify really quick lab two grading is done on canvas only. All you have to do is submit your puppet manifest files. You’ll probably submit one or two files. Most students will submit two files, one for Ubuntu and one for Windows. You can combine them in the one file if you want, but you don’t have to. You’ll just submit your manifest files via canvas and then we will go through and we will grade those offline by running them on RBMs to make sure that they work. If you want to move ahead to lab three and you are done with lab two, you can email us and I will put in a one point score until we get the grading updated. That will unlock lab three, but it also unlocks the model solutions for lab two. So be aware that once we put that point in and unlock the model solutions, you can’t go back and work on lab two again. But if you want to move ahead, just let us know. We’re happy to do that. But for lab two, you just have to submit stuff on canvas. You don’t have to schedule a Zoom meeting unless you have any questions.

So our first discussion is coming up tomorrow on Wednesday at two thirty. Our speaker this time is going to be Kyle Hutson. Kyle Hutson currently works at Lambda Labs, which is a big provider of GPU compute in the cloud for AI. He previously worked at KANREN, which is the Internet service provider for research organizations across Kansas, including K-State. Before that, he was a Beocat system admin for many, many years and got to be a really good friend with Kyle when he was here on campus working with Beocat. But now he works for Lambda Labs. He’s going to be able to talk all about. performance computing and some of the stuff that he did both at Canren and at Lambda and that discussion again is on Wednesday at 2 30. It’s in the Zoom room that we have for office hours. The Zoom information is posted on the homepage of Canvas.

To get points for this, there are two things you need to do. The first thing you need to do is submit a couple of questions you’d like to ask Kyle before he presents on Wednesday. So you can look him up, you can go to Lambda Labs, you can find Kyle Hutson on LinkedIn, you can look at KANREN and Beocat to learn more about his history and see if there are a couple of questions you come up with that you want to ask him. Then you can either attend the live session Wednesday at 2 30 and participate by asking at least one question to get your participation points or afterwards you can watch the video and then write a short response to respond to a couple of prompts that I will have based on our discussion with Kyle. You respond to the prompts mainly just to show that you watched the video and understood what Kyle was talking about. Those are your two ways to get points for these discussions so make sure you keep that in mind. The questions are due tomorrow about an hour before the session starts. And then the response is due a week after that, next Wednesday.

That’s really all we’ve got going on this week. If you have any questions, you can keep in touch on Ed discussion. You can also keep in touch on Discord or Teams. You can join me for Tea Time office hours every Monday. We hold that every Monday at one o ‘clock in 11, 17 on campus or on Zoom. Or you can also schedule one -on -one office hours with either myself or Josh. We’re always here to help. Hopefully everything’s going well in lab two. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I will see you next week.

Fall '24 Week 5

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week five announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. This week, you should be working on lab two, which is due today. We’ll talk about that momentarily. You also should be working on your response to the first discussion we had last Wednesday with Kyle Hudson. That response is due today, so make sure you get that submitted on Canvas. Then you’ll start in on lab three. So the quizzes for lab three are due next week. And then you’ll have the second discussion questions are due next Wednesday. And then in two weeks, you’ll be turning in lab three and your second discussion.

So for lab two, all you have to do is submit your two puppet manifest files via Canvas. You don’t have to schedule a meeting with myself or Josh unless you have any questions about your submission. Once you get your stuff submitted, we’ll probably go in tomorrow and enter a grade of one for everybody that has submitted the labs so that it will unlock lab three so you can get started on it. That will unlock the model solutions for lab two as well. And so that’s why we wait until you’ve submitted it and we put in a grade so that it will unlock the next lab. So no meeting is required for lab two. If you have any questions, feel free to post on that discussion or send us an email and we’d be happy to help.

So next Wednesday, our second discussion will be Seth Galitzer. Seth Galitzer is a name you’ve hopefully seen before. He is our computer support person for computer science. He runs all of our research servers. He runs the CS Linux server that you probably interacted with and has a lot of experience doing both desktop and server support at K -State. So we’re going to have that talk with him, not this Wednesday, but next Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. in our office hours Zoom room. So make sure you think of some questions you wanna ask Seth so that you get those published on Canvas by next week. So we’ve got some questions to ask Seth when he is here.

So next week, you’re gonna start working on lab three. Lab three involves core networking services such as DNS, DHCP, SNMP, Wireshark, all of these cool network tools. It’s purely done mostly in Ubuntu. You don’t do much in Windows on this lab except maybe test a couple of things in Windows. So the big thing with lab three is you’re gonna want to read the documentation for all of these tools very carefully and make sure you understand them. There’s a lot of hints and diagrams out there that you can look at. And of course, as always, ask questions. One of the big keys of this class is I don’t give you all of the answers right away. I expect you to come to me and ask questions if something doesn’t make sense. So don’t be afraid to reach out and ask questions and learn from that discussion as well.

So that’s really all I’ve got this week. As always, you can keep in touch by posting an Ed discussion on Discord or Teams by coming to Tea Time Office Hours, which are Mondays at one o ‘clock, and then by scheduling one -on -one office hours with either Josh or I anytime that you need help via Calendly. So hopefully you’re really excited about getting into networking this week. I think it’s one of the most interesting topics we cover in this class, and it’s definitely one that you probably haven’t done a lot with in the past unless you have some server experience. So hopefully this is a really interesting lab for you. As always, if you have any questions, let us know, and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 6

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week six announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2024. This week we have our second discussion session hosted on Wednesday, so we’ll talk about that in just a minute. Next Wednesday the response for that discussion is due and the questions for that discussion are due this Wednesday right before we start. And then also next Wednesday lab three is due as well. So for lab three, which you should be working on this week is adding some core network services to our Ubuntu VMs. You’re going to set static IP addresses. You’re going to install a DNS server and a DHCP server. You’re also going to install SNMP so that you can view some of your network statistics across the network. You’ll also install Wireshark and use that to capture some packets. All of this is really useful stuff to understand how networking services work.

Some big hints for lab three are to look at the hints and diagrams that I have, especially at the end of the textbook. There’s a lot of good hints there. And when all else fails, I encourage you to ask questions. Definitely one thing I’m seeing in this class is a lot of students are starting the lab assignments the day it’s due or the day before it’s due. And then they’re running in the questions and it takes a little time back and forth to get those questions answered. It’s much, much easier if you start these labs a bit early so that if you do run into problems or get frustrated, you can take a break, you can ask questions, you can come back to it when you’ve got a fresh mind. That’s really one of the big things to do in this class is take advantage of the fact that you have a full two week period to work on these labs and try and work on them a little bit at a time instead of trying to run it all in one shot.

So as a quick reminder for lab three, we’re going to do live grading again this time. So you’ll need to schedule a time to meet with either Josh or I to get lab three graded. As before, please check Josh’s calendar first. He’s most likely to have the most available time and be able to meet with you next week to get the lab graded. If he’s not available or his times don’t work for you, check my calendar and schedule some time with me. As a fair warning, I’m usually very busy Mondays and Tuesdays. So it’s hard to get time on my calendar those days. My calendar opens up later in the week, but it does mean that it’s after the deadline for lab three. So just be aware of that. When we do grading for lab three, we’re gonna ask you to show us several things. We wanna see that you can do remote connections using RDP to connect to your Windows machine, using SSH to connect to one of your Ubuntu machines. You should be able to show that you have a static IP on your Ubuntu VM labeled server. To be clear about that, you don’t have to install the server version of Ubuntu on that VM. You can use the desktop version just like we’ve been using, but you should name it as a server so that we’re gonna treat it like that. You should be able to show your DNS server settings and we’ll have you run some commands to do some DNS lookups to make sure your DNS server is working. We’ll check your DHCP settings, and we’ll also check to make sure your VMs are getting DHCP addresses from your DHCP server. And then we’ll also look for some screenshots of your SNMP process and your Wireshark process as well. You don’t have to show us those. You should be able to just show us the screenshots of those things, and then we’ll look at your screenshots real quick and make sure that they show exactly what we’re looking for.

All right. So after that we’re going to switch to Lab 4. Lab 4 is notoriously one of the more difficult labs in this class because you start working with Windows Server. And so in Lab 4 you’re going to set up a VM for Windows Server. For those of you that are working on Apple Silicon Max, you’ll want to do this in Azure. And I’ll be posting some videos later this week or early next week to show the process of doing this in Azure. For those of you that don’t have Apple Silicon Max, but if you want to play around with Azure, you can definitely do this in Azure. Just make sure that you have your student credits available in Azure. And if not, let me know. And we’re trying to figure out a way to renew those credits. So I’m working on that, but hopefully that should work for everybody. What we’re going to do on Windows is we’re going to set up an Active Directory server so that we can use that. That’s kind of the default standard for doing this shared logins on Windows. On Ubuntu we’re going to set up an OpenLDAP server. We’re going to configure clients to connect to those. And we also do one example of interoperability where we’re actually going to add an Ubuntu VM into our Windows Active Directory to show how that works. As with all of these labs, it’s really, really important that you make snapshots early and make snapshots often, especially when you’re doing the Active Directory and OpenLDAP installation part. If either of those fail, it’s really hard to undo them and try again. It’s much, much better to just roll back to a snapshot and try again. So make sure you make ample use of snapshots if you can as you’re going through that process.

So again, to be successful in this class, you really need to read the labs carefully. Take a look at all the post -it hints and resources. A lot of times in the lab assignments, if I ask you to do something and then below that I have a few links to resources, those are the documentation resources I read when I have to do this. And so it gives you a good idea of what I think is valuable resource versus just going out to Google and taking the first result that you find. I’ve tried to curate a list of resources that I find to be particularly useful and helpful for setting these up. But of course, things may not make sense. So if you get stuck, ask questions, if I can clarify something, if I can give you a little bit more direct hint, I’m happy to do that. You just have to ask some questions. The other big thing I’d students to do in this class is don’t spin your wheels. If you feel like you’re working on a project and you haven’t gotten anywhere in about a half hour or so, like if you just run up against a wall and you’re not making any progress, don’t sit there and spin your wheels for four or five hours. I always hate to hear that students have spent like five hours trying to debug a problem and then they email me and it’s a very simple fix that I can help them with. Don’t waste that five hours getting frustrated and spinning your wheels trying to solve a problem. It is totally possible in this class for you to come up against a problem that I’ve never seen before and it’s very difficult to debug. I would say every semester I have at least two or three students come up with a problem that is brand new that I’ve never seen before that we sometimes have to spend some time debugging if we can or we try and come up with a workaround. So it’s part of just working in a system administration class is we’re always going to get weird stuff. So if you get stuck, don’t spin your wheels, ask us questions. We’re more than happy to help you get unstuck. And I’d much rather do that than hear that a student gets frustrated trying to solve an area that they can’t even solve. So just be aware of that that is totally possible for those things to happen and we’re here to help.

So our speaker this week is Seth Galitzer. Seth is going to join us Wednesday at 2:30 for our discussion time. Seth Galitzer is the computer science support person. He works on all of our computer systems in computer science. He maintains our research systems, our servers, our desktop clients. He maintains everything for all of our department to function. He’s been doing that role for several years at this point. And so I really value Seth’s opinion and advice on things. So I’m really looking forward to have Seth come in and talk about his background and his experience as a computer support person. And again, that’s this Wednesday at 2 .30. Make sure you go in and write a couple of questions that you’d like to ask Seth and submit those to get your points for the discussion questions. And then you can either attend the live session and ask him a question to get your response points or you can watch the video afterwards, write a quick response and submit it. I’ll try and get that posted usually within an hour at the end of the meeting on Wednesday.

So that’s all I’ve got for today. Please feel free to keep in touch on Ed discussion, discord, teams, tea time, office hours. One other thing I wanted to mention in this class is I’ve gotten a lot of responses from the start -top stop continue survey to hold more office hours for this class. It’s really difficult to do that because of the asynchronous nature of this class. We don’t have a dedicated time where a lot of students are available and the few times in the past where I have held office hours. For example, I did office hours last Wednesday. We had one student drop in. And so it’s really difficult to do scheduled office hours for a class like this, which is why we have one -on -one office hours available all the time. Both Josh and I have a calendly setup that has all of our times available. So anytime you have a question and want to actually meet with us one -on -one, you can schedule a time on office hours. You can post on ed discussion. You can post on teams. We’re readily available to help you. And I find that that’s a much better use of our time than having these scheduled office hours. that nobody is able to show up for because it doesn’t match their schedule. So just keep that in mind. Likewise, if you’re working full -time and you wanna meet with me after hours, just email me and let me know. I’m available after hours. I just don’t have that available on my calendly because let’s face it, if I made those hours available, they would always get booked up and it would be hard for me to have a life outside of school. So I don’t make those openly available, but I do have times available in the evenings if you email me and ask for those. So that’s all I’ve got. I hope you don’t find this lab too frustrating. I know that labs three and four can be some of the more difficult labs in this class. I kind of front load some of the difficulty just to get over the hump and then you can get to some of the fun stuff toward the end of the semester. So as always, if you have any questions, let us know and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 7

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week seven announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. This week you should be working on the response to our second discussion with Seth Galliser. Those responses are due today, so make sure you get those posted. And then this Friday, lab three is due. Hopefully you saw the announcement earlier that I have moved all of the lab deadlines to Friday. That seems to work better for Josh and I and our schedule. We have a lot more time for grading on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Please bear in mind, you can go ahead and schedule your grading time right now as long as you know you’re going to have your lab done before that deadline. So if you want to reserve your time on Friday, go ahead and get it scheduled and we will take care of that. But just bear in mind that labs are now due on Fridays and then for the times when that conflicts I’ve moved things around. So just check the deadlines in Canvas because those are the accurate timelines for all of this.

So for lab three, you should be working on setting up core networking services on your servers. Most of this is done on a single Ubuntu VM with a Windows and Ubuntu client VM for some testing. You’re going to set a static IP address on your Ubuntu server. You’re going to install DNS and DHCP, install SNMP. You’re going to configure remote access on a couple of machines. Feel free to ask questions. I’m constantly fielding questions from students both in ed discussion via email and on Discord. I have a mega thread on ed discussion where I’m trying to consolidate all of the information that I get from all the different students I chat with. So feel free to check that out if you have any questions that might have a frequently asked question there that can answer some of your problems. But as always, don’t be afraid to ask questions or let us know either meet with Josh or I and we can help you out.

So for grading on lab three, the big things we’re going to ask you to do are demonstrate your remote connections. So be prepared to show that you can use remote desktop from one of your Ubuntu clients into the Windows machine using Remina. Also be able to show that you can use SSH from either Windows or Linux to get into your Ubuntu server. You should know what those commands are and how to use them. Make sure you can show us your static IP is set on your Ubuntu server. So you’ll just go into the. of the settings there. Be prepared to show us your DNS server settings. We’re gonna ask you to look at all those config files that you created and then we’ll have you run a few DIG commands to do some lookups. So make sure you’re comfortable with that. We’ll also check your DHCP settings and we’ll check to make sure that your clients are getting DHCP addresses from your DHCP server. For the SNMP part and the Wireshark part, we’re just gonna grade your screenshots. So make sure you have screenshots of the SNMP activity that we have you do and have screenshots of the eight different Wireshark packets that we have you capture and make sure it’s really clear in those screenshots that you found the thing that we’re looking for. Really, for a lot of this grading, I expect you, if everything goes well, to know how things work and you should be able to do these pretty quickly, we’ll be prepared to prompt you if you’re unsure. But let us know if you have any questions or concerns and we’ll work with you from there.

So for lab four, you’re going to create a Windows Server VM, and we’re going to set up Active Directory and open LDAP and configure the clients to work with those. We’re also going to configure one instance of interoperability, where we’ll have an Ubuntu client login to Active Directory, which is really cool. The big thing for this lab is to make snapshots as often as you can, especially when installing the Active Directory part of Windows Server, and when configuring the LDAP on Ubuntu, especially the security certificates, those tend to cause a lot of problems with students. So having a snapshot where you can roll back and try again is always helpful. For the few students that are going to do this in Azure, I’m going to get those videos hopefully posted in the next couple of days that give some basic ideas of how to set up virtual machines in Azure. If you want to work in Azure, you’re welcome to. It does work really well for this. I was able to do the Windows parts of lab four in Azure pretty easily, so just be aware of that. But lab four is probably the more difficult lab. It’s one of those that it either works or it doesn’t, and so grading this lab is actually really simple. It either works or doesn’t, but there’s a lot of different gotchas and things that you could run into to get lab four working. Most students in the past have said that lab four is probably the most difficult. It’s kind of tied between lab three and lab four, so just be aware of that. Start early, ask questions, let us know if you have trouble.

So as always, I’ve said in this class, the big key to success is reading the labs carefully, looking at the posted hints and discussions. I’m always willing to give hints and pointers and help debug stuff. It’s not that I’m going to tell you, oh, I don’t know what the error is. I will help you. You just have to reach out and ask. Use the resources that are available. And the big thing I tell students is don’t spin your wheels. If you’ve been debugging a problem for 20, 30 minutes, you haven’t made any progress and you’re not figuring anything out, that’s a good time to take a step back, relax, ask us a question, send us some screenshots, and we’ll help you figure it out.

So that’s really all I’ve got for this week. As always, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got a great discussion going on. discussion. I’m on Discord. I’m on Teams. I’ve got office hours today for this class from 2 .30 to 3 .30. I have tea time office hours on Mondays if you want to chat about other stuff. And then, of course, you can always schedule a one -on -one time with either Josh or I, and we’d be happy to help you out. So best of luck as you wrap up Lab 3 and get started on Lab 4. If you have any questions, let us know, and I will see you again next week.