Fall '25 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2025. My name is Russell Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is here on the screen. You can also find it on the Canvas homepage, on the syllabus, just about anywhere you look with this class. You can find my contact info. My email is here. My website is here. You can also find me on Teams and Discord as at russfeld. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of. One thing to be aware of, I do work remotely. I live in Kansas City, and so I’m working remotely Tuesdays through Fridays. I am on campus on Mondays. So if you want to see me in person, you can meet with me on Mondays. Usually Monday mornings is when I’m going to be available. And there is a way to schedule that that I’ll talk about here in just a minute. But just be aware of that. The rest of the week, I work remotely, which does mean I’m pretty easy to get a hold of on Teams or Discord or Ed Discussion anytime you have a question.

For the semester, I do have one graduate teaching assistant, Josh Barron. Josh worked with me last year on this class. So this is his second year working on this class. So he’s going to be a really good resource for you as well. So definitely get to know Josh. His Calendly link is also on the homepage and on the syllabus. So if you need to schedule a time to work with Josh, please do so. For this course, I encourage you to schedule with Josh first if he is available, mainly because I am paying him. And so we want to make sure we make good use of his time and make sure that he is very valued in this course. If you can’t get a hold of Josh or you need extra help and Josh is not available, please feel free to schedule with me. But definitely we want to make sure we make use of Josh’s time primarily if we can to make sure that we get our best value with Josh and that he gets lots of experience working with you. So that would be great.

So in this course, this course uses gated modules on Canvas. There’s one module due every other week. So make sure you check the due dates on Canvas. I will start publishing the modules probably. But by the time you see this video, the first couple modules will be published. I’m actually recording this video on Wednesday of the week before class, a little bit behind the scenes there. I still haven’t finished the first couple of assignments. I need to do them again to make sure that they actually work. But by the time you see this video, they will be published. So check the due dates on Canvas. For each lab assignment, for a lot of them, we’re going to do live grading. And I talk about that a little bit later. So just be aware. So, and then we’ll have some discussions. Throughout the semester, I try and bring in three to five guest speakers that work in industry, that work in IT. And so I bring them in, give them a chance to tell you about their job, what they do, and then you get to ask some questions of them. And then at the end of the semester, we’ll do a final project.

So communication in this course is pretty simple. There’s an Ed discussion board that is linked on the left side of Canvas. That is the place to go for questions for this course, discussions. Every lab assignment is going to have a mega thread there. That’s where I’m going to post my tips and tricks and ideas and anything that come up during the assignments. So please, please, please keep an eye on Ed Discussion. That is going to be the place to find the cool information. If you have a personal issue, a grading question, a to-do item for me, etc., email the help email address, which is cis527-help at ksu emailprod.onmicrosoft.com. If you’re using webmail, just type in cis527-help and it will auto-fill that for you. That is a great place. It goes to both me and Josh, and so either of us can respond to that pretty quickly. So what I tell students is email is the official communication, but ed discussion is much more flexible. And so we’ll use that for a lot of the stuff in this course.

So to be successful in this course, this course is fun because this course represents a lot of what it’s like to be an actual system administrator. However, that does mean that it can be very frustrating at times, or it can feel like I’m not giving you all of the answers, or things are a little harder than they should be. That’s kind of the way it is. I hate to say it. That is what being a sysadmin is like, and you’re going to experience that a little bit in this class. So I encourage you to come into this class with a growth mindset. You can do it. Anybody in this class can do everything I’m asking you to do. You just have to be willing to accept the fact that you have to learn a little bit and it’s going to take some struggle and that’s okay. Second big thing, do not just read or watch the content, but engage with the content. I’m going to, throughout my videos and throughout the assignments, I’m going to show you certain things. I really encourage you to engage with that. Follow along. Do it yourself. Try and do something a little bit different and see what happens. If you just skim through the videos and then jump right into the assignment, you’re going to feel like you don’t know what’s going on because you really didn’t engage with the content. So really take some time, engage with the content. Click the links that I have. Almost every page has a set of links at the top of it. They’re the links that I read when I was putting this page together. Click those links. Those are going to be so important for you. A lot of times those are the real documentation that you need to read in order to get the assignments to work.

Another big thing in these assignments is work iteratively, pick out a small goal, get that goal working, and then move on to something else. I see a lot of students that they’ll take an assignment that has seven bullet points and they’ll try and work on all seven bullet points at the same time. And that’s just nearly impossible to do. Pick one thing, get it working. Pick another thing, get it working. There’s a reason that I have the assignments broken out into several bullet points. And typically they’re in the order that I encourage you to work on them on. I don’t usually switch those up too often. So work on that. As always, save early, save often, make backups of your files. I guarantee at least once the semester, somebody in this course will make a change to a file in their virtual machine. They will roll back their virtual machine to a previous snapshot, and then they will realize that their file was not present in that snapshot and they lost all of their work. It happens every semester. I know it will happen. Hopefully it doesn’t happen to you. So save early, save often, back your stuff up. Be careful. Every sysenman learns this the hard way. I can share with you some great stories online of like there was a developer that worked for, I want to say it was GitHub or no, it was GitLab and accidentally deleted the production database because he forgot what terminal he was working in and just did the delete database command, thought he was working in the dev machine, ran that in prod, dropped all their data, lost a whole bunch of stuff. So be careful.

Last big thing, if you get stuck, ask for help. I do not expect anybody in this course to pass this course without asking me for help at least once, unless you have already been a sysadmin in your life. And even then, it might be really tricky. So I really encourage you to ask me for help. Ask Josh for help. We are here to help you out. We have some hints already ready to give you, but you have to ask. So don’t be afraid to ask for help if you get stuck.

So let’s talk about lab grading. Lab grading, the way we do most of the labs is we grade them interactively. What that means is when you’re done with your lab, you’re going to schedule a time to meet with either Josh or I using our scheduling link. Josh currently uses Calendly. I use the Office 365 booking tool. They’re basically the same thing. You’ll schedule a time with us via Calendly. You can schedule that time before your lab is done. So if you know you’re going to have your lab done on Friday, you can go ahead and schedule a time for Friday, even on Tuesday, but you have to get graded after your lab is done, obviously. So you can schedule at any time. Check Josh’s schedule first. If he’s not available, then schedule with me. But again, I want to prioritize scheduling with Josh so that we’re using up his time wisely. It does require up to four hours notice on both his calendar and my calendarly. So if you get done Friday at 3, you are SOL because you can’t schedule for Friday at 4.30. Also, probably it’s already been scheduled. So just be aware of that.

What you’ll do is you will have your lab open on your computer. This allows you to work on your desktop at home, whatever machine you’re running your virtual machines on. You’re going to load up your virtual machines. Please have them running when you join the Zoom. You’re going to join the Zoom. You’re going to share your screen with your virtual machines. And Josh and I are going to talk you through what we want to see. We expect you to be prepared to do the things we ask you to do. You should know how to do them. For example, in the first lab, we’re going to ask you, show us the file permissions for this folder that you created. I give you the command in the lab. You should be prepared to run that command and know what it does. That’s one big thing is make sure that you are prepared to demonstrate what you have done in this lab. You may want to practice a little bit to make sure you’ve got it. And then, of course, the other big thing is you cannot change once you’ve started. Once we have started grading, you run a command, you’re like, oh, crap, that doesn’t look right. It’s too late. You already turned it in. We saw it. That’s what it is. We are a little lenient about that, but generally you can’t make a change once you’ve started grading. So just be aware of that.

So there are some discussions that we’re going to have. Like I talked about, I’m going to bring in some guest speakers. So I’m going to send out a survey here pretty quick to try and figure out what day and time works best for everybody. And we’re going to set that as kind of an office hours time for this course. So please respond to that survey when you see that come out probably sometime this first week of class. We’ll schedule a time online via Zoom. What you’ll do is about a week before our discussion session, I will announce who the speaker is. I’ll give you a little bit of their background, their bio. And then what I ask you to do is submit questions for that person on Canvas before the presentation session. So one to three questions you want to ask that person. And then during the discussion, you can either join the live session and participate by asking one of your questions. Or if you’re not able to attend live in person or you don’t get your question asked during the in-person session, you can write a short little response that shows that you are there or watch the video afterwards. It’s pretty easy to do, but it gives you a chance to see and hear from some people working in industry. I definitely know one of the ones I’m going to get this semester is Seth Gallitzer, who was formerly the CSS admin. He’s now overseeing a lot of the engineering support staff. And so I really would love to hear from him and the change in his job responsibilities as he has migrated to a new job over the last year. So be aware that that’s coming.

All right. I think that’s all you need to know for this first week. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to keep in touch. Ed Discussion is the primary place to do that for this course. However, I’m available on Discord and Teams, so you can reach out to me either of those places. I usually can respond pretty quickly to those. I hold tea time office hours, usually on Monday mornings. Tea time is a good time to come in and chat with me and hang out and talk about anything outside of class. So life, the universe, and everything. And then, of course, you can always schedule one-on-one office hours with me using my schedule link that’s going to be on the syllabus on the homepage. And at the bottom of every email you’ve ever seen from me, it’s going to have the link right there to schedule office hours with me. So best of luck this semester. I really enjoy working with this class. I was a sysadmin for several years. This is my fun class to teach that I really enjoy working with you. So best of luck this semester. I hope things go well. And most likely you’ll hear from me about every other week in this class. I’ll try and post an announcements video as we go through the classes. We have each new assignment up there. So just be aware of that. You’ll be able to see these in the announcements on Canvas. Like I said, best of luck this semester, and I will see you again in a week or two.

Fall '25 Week 2

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2025. So this week you should be getting started on the first lab. Please bear in mind I do have a megathread on ed discussion for this lab. So if you have any questions or concerns with this lab, I’d really recommend that you post in the ed discussion and also check there, but you can also email to do lab grading. I get a lot of questions about lab grading in this class. The way this works is you’re going to schedule a time slot to meet with either the GTA Josh or myself. You need to meet with us before the lab is due. You can schedule your time slot anytime. So even if you’re not done with the lab right now, you can schedule a time slot for next Wednesday sometime when the lab is due, but you need to have the lab done before that time slot, obviously. So you schedule a time slot. Please check Josh’s calendar first. And then if he doesn’t have any times available that works for you, then schedule with me. Please bear in mind, I am generally very busy on Mondays because I’m on campus and then a little bit on Wednesdays and Thursdays as I have lab meetings and other things going on those days. Tuesdays and Fridays are usually pretty open for me. So anyway, schedule with Josh first, then me using our calendly links, or I also have a booking link that you can use.

Before the lab grading time, make sure you make snapshots of everything so that they’re all ready to go. Have everything ready to go when you join the Zoom. Please, please, please don’t join the Zoom. And then we have to sit there and wait five minutes while all your VMs load. Have everything up and ready to go. And then be prepared to demonstrate everything that you did on the lab. We’re going to ask you things for this first lab, like show us how you changed the computer name. Where’s the computer name now? Show us where the user accounts are. Can you show that you got all the user accounts created? Show us that the files are created and have the correct file permissions. Those sorts of things. We’re going to ask you to show us that. And so we expect you to remember how you did it and be able to demonstrate that you did it correctly. So we’ll be prepared to kind of coach you along if you’re not sure. We really want you to demonstrate the work that you did. It’s a very live grading type of situation. And then, of course, don’t forget that as soon as we start grading, everything is locked in. If you notice you made a mistake, it’s too late to change it. But we’re pretty lenient on things, so don’t worry too much about it. We really just want to make sure that you’re understanding what’s going on and get things working the way they’re supposed to.

So second thing going on in this class is the live discussions. Hopefully everybody filled out the survey. It’s looking like we’re going to do those Tuesdays, Tuesday afternoons. So the schedule is coming soon. Usually the first one I try and get is Seth Gallitzer, our former C assistant administrator, and I wanted the SysAdmins for Engineering. So I will try and get the schedule put out soon. We’re going to have anywhere from three to five of these discussions throughout the semester. If you remember, the discussions are a chance for me to bring in somebody in industry that works in a field related to system administration, and you get to talk with them, hear about their experiences and what they’re up to. The way the discussions work is I will post the discussion topic and the person and their little bio about a week beforehand. You need to go in and ask two questions beforehand in the Canvas assignment. Then you can either attend the live session on Zoom or you can watch the video afterward. If you attend the live session, you just have to ask one of your questions to get points. Otherwise, if you don’t ask a question or if you watch the video afterward, there’s a short prompt that I’ll have you respond to. It’s like a few sentences for the prompt, just to show that you watched the video and paid attention and kind of have some comments on what was said. On the days that we don’t have a discussion, I’ll use those as kind of an office hours. So again, those will probably be Tuesdays out in the afternoon starting next week. So watch for a more detailed announcement with that coming up.

To get help in this class, there are three big ways to get help. First and foremost, we have the CIS 527 help email. That goes to both Josh and I. However, I really prefer that you use the Ed Discussion board as your primary source of help. I post mega threads for each of the lab assignments on there. It’s a great place to have discussion. My mega thread header includes some hints for all of these labs. I went ahead and pre-populated the first four labs worth of Ed Discussion posts already. So they’ll be posted on a schedule as those labs come available. So definitely check Ed Discussion. Check those mega threads. Check some of the other threads in Ed Discussion that are going on. I’ve gotten a lot of questions via email about using a Mac silicon to do this class. I already have a post on Ed Discussion about that. So please check the stuff in Ed Discussion. And then, of course, if you need to schedule a one-on-one time with me, you can either schedule with Josh and his Calendly or me and my Calendly. Again, I prefer if you start with Josh just to keep him busy. He’s an excellent GTA. He’s been doing a lot of good work in this class, but you can also always schedule with me if you have any questions as well.

So that’s really all that’s going on for this first week of class. The first lab is not due until middle of next week, but hopefully you’re getting started on it this week. Usually we have to work out a few little bugs and errors and things as we get this first lab up and running, especially if you’ve never worked with virtual machines or installed operating systems before. It’s a lot of new experiences this first time. And so I really like this class because it’s a good experience. It gives you a lot of opportunities to do things in system administration you’ve probably never done before. So as always, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, best of luck this week, and I will see you again next week.

Fall '25 Week 3

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2025. So this week you should be working on lab one. Lab one is due tomorrow by 7 p.m. So make sure you get that done. Basically all you need to do if you haven’t already is schedule a grading time with either Josh or myself. We will meet with you on Zoom. We will have you share your screen and walk through getting all your lab graded. Remember that every day a lab is late. It is 10% off of the total points in the class or in the project. So this lab is worth 50 points. If you get graded after Wednesday, it’s going to be worth 45 points and it goes down from there. Then next week on Wednesday, the module two quizzes are due. And then the week after that on Wednesday the 24th, Lab 2 is due. Lab two, you don’t have to schedule a grading time for. All the grading for that is done on Canvas. So unless you have questions or want to do an interactive grading, all you have to do for Lab 2 is submit your two puppet manifest files on Canvas and we’ll grade those offline. Also, our first discussion is going to be coming up soon. I’m still waiting to hear back from some of our speakers and I’ll talk about that in just a second.

So the discussion sessions, it looks like Tuesdays at 2.30 is the time that works for everybody. So I’m going to get that on the calendar. Starting not this week, but next week, I will try and have office hours during the Tuesdays from 2.30 to 3.30 time slot. I’m going to send some invites to speakers that are people in industry working in IT and related fields. And our first speaker is to be announced very shortly. I’m hoping it’s Seth Gallitzer, and I can get him in here in the next couple of weeks. So watch for more announcements for that. As soon as the discussion sessions are announced, you’ll be given a week to come up with questions that you want to ask our speaker. There’ll be an assignment posted on Canvas. You just submit a couple of questions and then join the live discussion session or watch the video afterward to get points.

So we’re going into lab two. The point of lab two is to basically redo the first lab, but this time you’re going to use Puppet. So for this lab, you’re going to start with two brand new VMs. You’re going to reinstall the operating system. You’re going to do some updates, install Puppet, and then you’re going to make a snapshot at that point. You don’t have to do any other setup other than what the lab tells you to do. Basically install the OS, set the computer name, do some updates, install Puppet, make a snapshot. Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to write a Puppet manifest file to do all the rest of the setup, including creating user accounts, installing software, setting up files and folder permissions, groups, et cetera, et cetera. You’re going to write a manifest file to do all of that for you, and you’re going to test that manifest.

The easiest way to test that manifest is to copy paste it into the VM, run the puppet manifest, and then for testing, you need to run it, reboot, and run it again, and then check to see if everything works. The reason you have to reboot, if you’re a member from Lab 1, is group memberships do not take effect immediately. They need a reboot for them to take effect. And so you run your puppet manifest, reboot for the groups to take effect, run it again to get the file permissions right, and then check for everything. Try and keep your puppet manifest very simple. A good solution is less than 200 lines of code. I think my solution is even less than 100 lines of code. It can be very simple. Use the puppet resource command to query the system as it’s set up, but don’t use the output of that. Just use individual lines of things you want to change. Kind of follow my lab instructions, but remember a solution can be pretty simple.

So another big thing to keep in mind in this class is a growth mindset. The labs in this class are challenging. They are meant to be challenging. This is a 500 level technical elective for a lot of you. And if you aren’t challenged, then you don’t learn and you don’t grow. So you need to come into this with a growth mindset. You can do it. Anybody can do it, but it is going to be challenging. The things that you can do for success, read the link to documentation, ask for clarification on things, start early on the lab and try and work through it methodically. I guarantee a recipe for not succeeding in this class is to wait until the Sunday before lab is due and then start on the lab because you’re going to run out of time and you won’t have time to ask questions. So start early, work methodically, and make snapshots. Snapshots in VMware are your friend. They are the auto-saves that you can use to go back anytime you need to go back.

So other than that, if you have any questions, you can keep in touch. We’ll have good discussions on Ed Discussion. You’ll see a mega thread posted there for every lab so you can work there. I’m going to start doing office hours like I scheduled next Tuesday starting at 2.30. So you can join office hours or you can always schedule a one-on-one time.

Also, don’t forget coming up tomorrow is the ACM Back to School Bash. It is Wednesday, September 10th in the engineering atrium from 5 to 7 p.m. It is open to everybody, computer science students, ICS students. If you are in this class, you are welcome to attend. The Back to School Bash is a great way to see what the student organizations are up to in computer science. You can learn about ACM, Cyber Defense Club, Hat Case State, all of the things that are going on. They’re going to have free food. So I encourage you to sign up and join. Again, back to School Bash is tomorrow, Wednesday, September 10th from 5 to 7 in the engineering atrium.

So hopefully things are going well. I know I’m asking you to do things again. That’s the way it goes in computer science, but you’re going to get really good at it. So hopefully it’s not too bad to have to do a lab setup again. As always, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, best of luck, and I will see you again next week.