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

Resources

• 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.