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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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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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.

Fall '24 Week 8

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Hello and welcome to the week 8 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So coming up we’re working on lab 4 so by next Monday you should have the quizzes done for lab 4 and then by next Friday you’ll be turning in lab 4 itself. This really this couple of weeks this is probably the hardest part of this class I know a lot of students struggle with getting lab 4 up and running not necessarily because it’s difficult but because there’s a lot of bits and pieces to deal with and there’s a lot of dependencies that you have to work around as well. So those are all things to keep in mind.

So like you’ve seen before lab 4 involves creating a Windows Server virtual machine and installing Active Directory on it. We’re also going to install the open LDAP server on our Ubuntu system. We’re going to configure clients to log in through those systems so we’ll configure Ubuntu to log in through LDAP and we’ll configure both a Windows and an Ubuntu to log in via Active Directory. That’s really all it is. One thing I definitely will tell you to do is make snapshots in this lab especially before you configure Active Directory on Windows and before you configure open LDAP and the TLS part of open LDAP on Ubuntu. Those are two steps that might cause you issues and so having a snapshot you can roll back to is really really useful.

So for the lab 4 setup there are a couple of different ways you can do lab 4. I have a document in the textbook that describes this but there’s basically three options. If you have a working lab 3 solution and you want to keep working on it you can continue to use the lab 3 DNS and DHCP server and it should work well for all of this. The only thing you really have to do on lab 4 is on the Windows client you have to set a separate static DNS address to point to the Windows server. If your DHCP is not working but you want to use your DNS you can use your DNS server from lab 3 as static DNS entries or the third option and this is usually what I recommend if you’re not so sure about your lab 3 setup is to set up manual hosts file entries. I’m gonna try and record a video for that later today or tomorrow and post that out there so you can see what I mean when I talk about that setup but there’s really three different ways that you can set up lab 4. so that the Active Directory and OpenLDAP parts will actually work correctly.

So for grading on Lab 4, this lab is actually really easy to grade. It either works or it doesn’t for the most part. So we’re gonna check that your Windows Server is installed, that you have a user and a group in your Active Directory, and then we’ll double check to make sure your Windows client can log in using your Active Directory. On the Ubuntu side, we’re gonna check that you have OpenLDAP installed. We’re gonna look at the LDAP account manager to make sure there’s a user and a group configured there. And then you should have an Ubuntu client that logs in via LDAP and an Ubuntu client that also can log in via the Active Directory. Those may be the same client with two different snapshots. Either way you wanna do that is fine. But most of the point of this lab is if your clients can log in via the appropriate AD or LDAP server, that’s what we’re looking for and you’ll get the points for this lab.

So that’s really all I’ve got going on this week. So as always, there’s gonna be a mega thread on ed discussion if you have any questions there. You can ping me on Discord and Teams. You can come to Office Hours. I’m really here to help. I’m also going to be trying to schedule a couple more discussion sessions over the next month. So be on the lookout for that as I get those schedules posted. I just need to hear back from a couple of speakers to see what days work best for them. We’re going to try and get at least two more, maybe three more scheduled this semester, depending on if the scheduling works out for everybody. So we’re at the halfway mark of the semester. This is week eight. Hopefully things are going well. For most students, they point at lab four is one of the more difficult labs in this class. After this, we’re going to switch gears a little bit and do some other stuff. So hopefully everything goes well with this lab. But as always, if you have any questions, let us know. And I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 9

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Hello and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. I’m coming to you this week from my office on campus because I’m on the road a little bit. Hopefully the video quality is not too bad and you can get everything that I need to get across in these announcements. So for this week you should be working on lab four. Lab four is due this Friday so make sure that you’re getting that done and have your grading time scheduled. Right now I have a lot of availability on Friday and I believe Josh should also have availability toward the end of the week so hopefully you can get your grading time scheduled. If you’re having any questions or issues with the lab let us know and we’ll definitely work with you on that and then next week you’ll transition over and start working on lab five.

So for lab four the grading for lab four is actually really straightforward it kind of just works or it doesn’t. What we’re going to look at is that you’ve installed a Windows Server and configured that with an Active Directory that has a user and a group in it as directed and then you should configure a Windows client to log in using that Active Directory. On the Ubuntu side of things you should on your Ubuntu server install OpenLDAP and have it configured with the user and group through the LDAP account manager and then you should have an Ubuntu client logs in via LDAP and then another Ubuntu client which could be either a different VM or a different snapshot of the same VM that then logs in via Active Directory. That’s what we’re looking for for lab four. Generally if it works we just check that your server has AD you show us that you’re logged in check that OpenLDAP is running and show us that you’ve logged in on both Ubuntu’s that’s really all it takes. If everything is configured and running takes less than five minutes if you’re having issues with it then we’ll have to dig in a little bit and figure out exactly what’s working and what doesn’t so we can at least get you some partial credit. So as always success in this class involves reading the assignments carefully looking at the posted diagrams. I just posted a video last week showing some network setups for lab four including how to set things up in Azure so take a look at those videos and ask me if you have any questions. Use the resources that are available especially in the lab I usually link right below a task in the lab I link the resource that I use to do those tasks and finally if you get Don’t spin your wheels if something’s not working and you’re not sure stop and ask us a question Post on a discussion email us post on discord, whatever Josh And I will try and answer as soon as we can And it’s much easier to maybe get the right answer than to spin your wheels and try a whole bunch of things Especially unless you’re very careful and have a snapshot in VMware that you can roll back to in order to get things working again.

So for lab 5 coming up next week, we’re gonna move totally into the cloud for some of this class What I normally do with this class is build droplets in digital ocean I find the digital ocean is the easiest to use cloud platform for this We’ll set up SSH and firewall although we’ll need to make a couple of changes to that because campus is now blocking SSH So I’m working on getting that lab updated Then we’re gonna set up some simple Apache websites a DNS domain name And we’re also going to play a little bit with Docker instead of a Docker reverse proxy Notta Notta Notta So, Lab 5 is generally a little bit smaller than Lab 3 and 4. It’s much more straightforward. It’s working in the cloud, in DigitalOcean, in a couple of droplets. If you want to do Lab 5 on a different cloud provider such as AWS or Azure, you’re welcome to do that. I will just warn you that I don’t have as much experience with those platforms versus DigitalOcean where I host my own stuff and so I find it a little bit easier to debug and work on things in DigitalOcean versus those other platforms but really you can go any way you want.

For this lab you’ll need to set up a DigitalOcean account and you’ll also need to set up a domain name if you so choose. You can get all of this through the Education GitHub Pack. DigitalOcean also has a free trial offer that URL gets cut off but it’s try .digitalosion .com slash free trial offer or if you just google it. Likewise if you go to nc .me you can get a .me domain for $1. So both of those are really great. I also have credits that I can share on these and so if you want my referral link for either of these just let me know. I’m happy to share that with you. In total if you even have to pay for this out of pocket it should cost you about $11, a dollar for the domain name and $10 on DigitalOcean but most of this you should have more than enough free credits to do this. You can also use an existing domain name if you have one or contact me if you don’t want to set up your own domain name and I can set you up as a sub -site under the cis527 .org site that I own so that you can work with it from there.

That’s really all I’ve got for this week. I’ll spend a little bit more time next week talking more in depth about lab 5 but in the meantime if you have any questions keep in touch on id discussion on discord teams come to office hours and let us know how we can help. So next week we’re really going to start leaning into the cloud. I always remember this particular xkcd comic that talks about the cloud. We’ll get into this a little bit next week in my lectures but really the cloud is just a point of view it’s just somebody else’s system and so in theory the entire cloud could just be some server in somebody’s basement with a lot of caching. So I really like this xkcd comic it gets the idea across. So hopefully everything goes well this week. As always if you have any questions let us know and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 10

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Hello and welcome to the week 10 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So this week you should get started on working on lab five, which is our first lab completely done in the cloud and DigitalOcean. That lab is going to be due next Friday by 5 p .m. So make sure you get that done and are scheduled to get that graded. We also have our next discussion session coming up, not this Wednesday, but next Wednesday, October 30th.

So make sure you take a look at that and start thinking of some questions for our guest speaker. For lab five, the grading that we’re looking at is basically your ability to connect to the front end either via SSH or via the cloud terminal that’s available on DigitalOcean. From front end, you should be able to SSH to back end by just typing SSH back end. That confirms that you’re using an SSH key and that you have an SSH config file that is working correctly. We’re going to check the firewall settings on both systems as well as the date and time being set correctly. On the back end, you’re going to have Apache set up and you’re going to have at least one virtual host running in Apache. We’ll check to make sure your DNS and HTTPS is working on that system. And then on the front end, you’re going to run a Docker reverse proxy of some kind and have two front end websites working there as well. Those won’t be using HTTPS because we’re using a reverse proxy that may not support HTTPS directly, but hopefully you can get that up and running and be able to show the CIS 527, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie websites working on your domain name.

For next week, we also have a discussion coming up. We’ve got our speaker, Ethan Bergstrom. Ethan Bergstrom works at Oracle Health, previously Cerner, works in the IT department. He actually manages a lot of their cloud infrastructure for hosting their health system for small and medium hospitals across the country. He does a lot of stuff at this large scale of system administration, being on call, working on performance tuning, working on monitoring and maintenance of these large systems. He has a wealth of knowledge, and so I’m really excited to bring Ethan in to talk about what he does in the IT world. That talk is going to be… Wednesday, October 30th at 2 .30 PM. I’ve posted a little bit of his bio and also a link to his LinkedIn on Canvas so you can learn a little bit more about Ethan and his background and write some really good questions to ask Ethan. You can also see a video that he did about four years ago, the last time I brought him in. I know things have changed a lot since then, so I’m really excited to see what he’s been working on.

Then the next lab, we’re gonna switch to Lab 6 in a couple of weeks. Lab 6 is kind of a hybrid lab where we’re going to work on file servers and drive mappings in VMware. We’re also going to work on building an application server both on the Windows server that you did the Active Directory domain on, and we’re going to work on adding some web apps to our digital ocean droplets as well. That lab is not posted yet. I need to make a few updates to that lab based on some changes this year, but I’ll try and get that posted within the next week or so so that if you’re working a little bit ahead, you can get started on Lab 6 soon.

Finally, the other big thing to think about in this class is this class does include a final project and the final project is coming up in about a month. The idea for the final project in this class is mostly a thought exercise. I don’t expect you to actually build something or fix something, but what I expect you to do is propose something that you want to do. And that proposal could be about building something IT related or fixing something IT related. It could be designing a web resource for a new startup company. It could be a way to automatically set up laptops for school. It could be a central authentication system for a company or nonprofit. It could be a discussion of whether you should have thin clients versus thick clients in computer labs. Anything that you can think of that revolves around anything that we’ve talked about in IT so far is a fair game for the final project. The final project itself consists of three parts. The first part, you’re going to do a SWOT analysis, which is a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis of your proposal. So you kind of have to define your proposal, define your scope and what you’re trying to propose. Do an analysis of it. You’ll make a writeup of your analysis that includes your SWOT analysis in that writeup. It’s kind of a technical white paper style of writeup. You kind of pretend that I’m your CIO or CTO and you’re trying to convince me that this is a good idea. Or likewise, you may convince me that this is a bad idea that we don’t want to do it based on your SWOT analysis.

The only thing that you’ll actually do in the tech field is you’re going to make some sort of a proof of concept for your idea. So for example, if your idea is to migrate all of K -State systems to Azure, then your proof of concept might be to build a system on Azure just to show that you have a little familiarity working with Azure. Likewise, if you’re looking at antivirus clients, you might in a VM install a few different antivirus clients and decide which one of those you want to use. That’s kind of the idea for the final project. What you’ll do is you’ll submit your writeup and a short video talking about your project. That’s really all it takes. If you have any questions or aren’t sure about any ideas, you can schedule a time to chat with me. I’m happy to work with you to try and find an idea. The ideas themselves are due before Thanksgiving break. That gives me a quick time to take a look at your idea. And then it gives you a couple of weeks around Thanksgiving. giving before the finals week to actually write up and do your SWOT analysis and things like that. The final project is only 10% of your grade, so I don’t expect you to spend more than about a week or two on it. It’s mainly meant to take the place of a last lab assignment which are also about 10% of your grade.

So for lab five, you’re going to be using DigitalOcean for cloud providers. If you don’t have a DigitalOcean account, I encourage you to get signed up for one ASAP. You can go to this link, try .digitalocean .com slash free trial offer. That should get you a hundred free credits there. If you want, I also have a signup link that you can email me for. I have a code that gets you a $200. free trial, it does give me $25 back if you spend $25 with DigitalOcean. So I don’t put it on here, but if you want it, ask me for it and I can get you a link that will get you $200 of free credit on DigitalOcean. The other thing that you’ll do is you’ll register a domain name. You can do that through Namecheap by going to nc .me and signing up with your ksu .edu email account, which gets you a free .me domain for the first year. Both of these are optional. I can’t make you spend any money in this class. So if you don’t want to do that, please let me know. I can set you up as a subdomain under mycis527 .org domain. And likewise, I can set you up as a sub team under my DigitalOcean account. I prefer that you set your own up because I think it’s really cool that by the end of the semester, you’ll have your own web hosting, your own domain name. You can set up your own website, however you want to do it. But if you don’t want to do that or you’re concerned about signing up for any of these things, let me know. And I have options for you as well.

So that’s really all I’ve got this week. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. I’m available on ed discussion. There’s already a lab five mega thread out there that you can post in. You can chat with me on Discord or Teams. You can come to Tea Time office hours. And as always, we have our one -on -one office hours as well. I’ll definitely have office hours this Wednesday if you have any questions on lab five. So feel free to stop by. We’re kind of nearing the end of the semester. Hopefully things are going well. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 11

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Hello, and welcome to the week 11 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. This week, you’re working on lab 5, lab 5 is due on Friday. As before, you’ll need to schedule a grading time with either Josh or I to get your lab graded. Lab 5 is pretty straightforward to grade, we’re just going to check some settings on your digital ocean droplets, and then we’re going to make sure that you’ve set up a domain name and have HTTPS working, the Apache sites working, and the Docker sites working. It usually only takes a few minutes to grade if everything’s working correctly. So hopefully you get everything done. Lab 5 is usually a little bit of a downward curve on the difficulty in this class, so hopefully it goes well. Also, don’t forget, our third discussion session is coming up tomorrow, Wednesday this week at 2:30.

So for lab 5 grading, like I said, we just want to see that you can SSH to your front end either from your VM or using the virtual terminal on digital ocean. Once you’re in front end, you should be able to SSH directly from front end to back end just by typing SSH front end and have the key set up there. That’s the big thing we’re going to check. We’re going to check that your firewall is set, your date and time is set correctly. Then on the back end, we’re going to check that Apache is set up with a proper virtual host, has HTTPS working, we’ll check on the front end that your Docker reverse proxy is set up with at least two different hosts there, and then your DNS name should work for all three of those sites as well.

So also coming up this week, we have our third discussion session. Our speaker is Ethan Bergstrom, who works at Oracle Health, formerly Cerner. He works a lot in their hosted provider, so where they provide hosting services for hospitals that want to host their Cerner software on their premises. So Ethan’s got a lot of good background in system administration at a very high, large industrial level, so I’m really excited to bring him back in. He will be here tomorrow on October 30th at 2 .30. If you haven’t already, please go online and fill out some questions that you want to ask Ethan. I have linked his bio and his LinkedIn on the discussion assignment so that you can find that. So feel free to check that out and come prepared with some really good questions for Ethan. Again, that’s tomorrow at 2 .30.

So after this week, we’re gonna switch over to lab six, which is about file servers and application servers. This lab is a little bit more complex than lab five. I will get this posted later on this week so you can get started on it. Basically, we’re going to take both our Windows and our Linux server and add file server capabilities to it. And we’re gonna look at how we can actually automatically map some of those server drives on both systems. Then we’ll also create an application server so that we can install a web application on both. The web application we’re gonna do in DigitalOcean on the Droplets, on Windows we’re gonna do on the Windows server. The goal at the end of this is you should have a working file server and a working application server in both Windows and Linux.

Finally, don’t forget you should be thinking about your final project. The final project in this class is to basically propose either building something or fixing something, and then you’re going to do a SWOT analysis and present a write -up and a proposal in a video about this project. There’s lots of great ideas for the final project out there. The best thing I can tell you is if you’re not sure what you want to do for your final project, start scheduling some time and chat with me for ideas. I’m happy to talk about things. The proposal for your final project is due the Friday before you leave for Thanksgiving break. I will review them pretty early Thanksgiving break week and give you a thumbs up if your final project proposal is approved. Then you can do the SWOT analysis and create the write up and the video proposal of your final project. It should be pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions or concerns, let me know. The other question I’ve gotten a lot on the final project is on grading. The final project is worth 10% of your grade, but it scales linearly. So if you look at your grade at the end of the semester and you’re on track to get an A, if you only get half of your final project, then you can just do either the write up or the video. You don’t have to do both and I will grade it as 50%. So talk to me if you’re not sure about that, but I have some flexibility in your final project. If you know where your grade is going to be, we can work with you to make sure that you’re not overloading yourself if you’ve got other things going on during finals week.

So that’s all I’ve got this week. As always, if you have any questions, you can keep in touch with me on Ed discussion, Discord teams and come to office hours. We’re always happy to help. Otherwise, I hope you’re having a good time getting through this class. We got Halloween week coming up, so hopefully you’ve got some fun plans for Halloween. Best of luck this week and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 12

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Hello and welcome to the week 12 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So you should be starting on lab six this week. Lab six is going to be due next week on Friday. We’re also going to have our fourth discussion session next week on Wednesday. So our next discussion speaker is Sarah Allen. Sarah Allen is a computer support person for McCon Gordon construction. Sarah was a student in this class a few years ago and now works in industry as a frontline support tech. She has a lot of good experience and stories to tell from working in that industry. So she’s going to come in and be our guest speaker this Wednesday, November 13th. So a week from this Wednesday at 2 30 p .m. So make sure you put that on your calendar. The questions post is already up so you can get questions asked for Sarah. I’ve also linked her LinkedIn so you can learn a little bit more about her background and what she does.

So for lab six that you’re working on, we’re going to do a whole bunch of different things. This is kind of where we break out a little bit. We’re going to explore file servers on both Windows and Linux using your local VMs for the most part. If you’re working in Azure, you’ll do your file server on the Windows server in Azure. We’re also going to work on drive mappings between the two so you can connect to those file servers. We’re going to build an application server on Windows. We’re going to do that on the Windows server by installing a web application. And then on Linux, we’re going to do that in the cloud using our Digital Ocean Droplets to build some working web apps there.

So don’t forget the other thing in this class is there is a final project in this class. It is worth 10 percent of the grade. The proposal for your final project is due the Friday before Thanksgiving, so I can review those and get those back to you pretty quickly. The idea, remember, behind the final project is to do a proposal and a SWOT analysis. The proposal is to build something or fix something I .T. related. It could be a web resource for a startup like how would you build a website with high availability and failover modes? How would you automatically set up laptops for school? How would you define a central authentication system for a company using Active Directory or LDAP? Discussing the pros and cons of thin clients versus thick clients in computer labs, lots of different things you can do. to remember this is mostly a thought exercise where you get to set the framing and then you get to do the analysis, but you’ll also have a small proof of concept of your project that’s something related. If you’re not sure what to do, feel free to chat with me for ideas. I’m always happy to work with you and kind of help you find some ideas or final projects that might work for you.

So that’s all I’ve got this week. Hopefully if you’re on campus, you’re looking at either volunteering for the high school programming contest, which is tomorrow, or participating in Hack case eight, which is this weekend, albeit both events. So other than that, keep in touch on Discord or come to Tea Time Office Hours or chat with me on Ed discussion. We’d be happy to work with you if you have any questions, but that’s all I’ve got this week. So good luck and I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 13

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Hello and welcome to the week 13 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2024. This week you should be working on lab six, which is due on Friday. So make sure you get your grading time scheduled sometime this week to get that turned in. We’re also going to have our fourth discussion session this Wednesday. So make sure you get those questions posted before two o’clock that day. And then you’ll be able to meet with our speaker and ask questions when she speaks at 2.30.

So our discussion speaker this week is Sarah Allen from Account Gordon Construction. Sarah is a former student in this class and now works as a frontline tech support person for a large construction company. She has a lot of really good experience working in the front lines of tech support and has some really good advice for you in your career. She’s going to be speaking with us tomorrow at 2.30 via zoom. So make sure you set that on your calendar if you’re available to join us, but don’t forget to ask your questions beforehand. And if you can’t join us, make sure you watch the video and respond to it afterward.

So for lab six that you’re working on right now, we’re going to be setting up file servers and drive mapping so that we can automatically connect to different systems. We’re also going to be setting up application servers. So this is a web server either on Windows or on Ubuntu and working with some web apps as well. These kind of exercise all the different VM setups that we have. So it’s a pretty cool lab, I think. And it really gets to some of the later stuff that we’re going to do in system administration.

So last thing to keep in mind is don’t forget that you need to be thinking about a final project. Your final project presentation is due before you leave for Thanksgiving. The idea behind the final project is to propose either building something, fixing something like a web resource or setting up laptops. It’s a thought exercise. So all you have to do is set the stage. So give the background of what you’re actually doing, talk about your proposal, do a SWOT analysis of your proposal, and then tell me whether it’s a good idea or not. You can pretend that I’m pretty technical as your reader, like a CIO or a CTO. And basically you’re proposing this idea of something you want to do. You don’t even have to be able to actually do it. For example, you can propose something way bigger and more complex than you could actually accomplish. But you should know enough about it to be able to reason about it and write a SWOT analysis about it. And that’s really what we’re looking for in this final project.

Other than that, I think things are going well in this class. So if you have any questions, you can keep in touch with us on Ed discussion, on Discord and Teams. You can come to Office Hours. We’re always able to help. We’re on week 13 of 16, so we’re looking toward the end of the semester. As always, if you have any questions, let us know. And otherwise, I will see you again next week.

Fall '24 Week 14

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Hello and welcome to the week 14 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So remaining in this class is just a few things. The discussion for response is due tomorrow, so make sure you get that turned in. Your project proposal is due this Friday, so that’s just your quick proposal for your final project. It should be about a paragraph or so. And then the rest of the class, Lab 7 and the final project are both due by the end of finals week. And then of course you’ll also get some TVALs from me as well.

So for Lab 7, I have posted Lab 7. The grading for Lab 7 is all offline. There’s no interactive meeting required. You can even submit these tasks separately as you get them done. That’s totally fine. For the first task, you’re going to upload a zip file and a readme for your backup project. For the second task, you’ll upload the URL for your monitoring system. And then for the third task, you will share us either your GitHub or your GitLab repository and the URL where your website is deployed. That’s all you really have to do for Lab 7. It’s kind of all or nothing. It either works or it doesn’t, but it gives you a good chance to get some last-minute points for this class. As always, if you have questions on Lab 7, let us know and we are happy to help.

So the last part of this class is working on a final project. If you haven’t come up with a good final project idea yet, I encourage you to schedule some time to meet with me this week so we can chat about it. In general, I tell you to think about the thing that you’ve liked most in this class and kind of build upon that. The idea is it’s a thought exercise. You’re going to work on designing and implementing a solution for a problem. So you’ll spend some time defining the background and the problem and the specs around that problem and what you want. Then you’re going to propose a technical solution for that that uses system administration techniques. And then you’ll do a SWOT analysis of your proposal and give us a conclusion that says hopefully that it’s good. This is targeted at me as your CIO or CTO. So it can be pretty high level and pretty technical. You can assume that I kind of know what you’re talking about, but really you should assume that I’m a skeptic and that I’m looking at your your project and your proposal and trying to decide if it’s a good idea for our company to put resources into the solution. So you really have to convince me that you know what you’re talking about.

What you’ll turn in is two things. You’re gonna turn in a written report. There is a template that you can use. That template has some bullet points in it to just tell you what those paragraphs should be. Do not just use the bullet points and answer the questions. It should be in paragraph format where it’s like a written report. Likewise, your SWOT analysis should not be just a bulleted list. It should be like a written out. Here’s the strengths I’ve identified, why these are strengths, why I’ve highlighted them, things like that. You can include graphics and data as needed. You may also include citations as needed, so make sure you include that. So your written report is half the project. The other half the project is a presentation. Your presentation is going to be around 15 minutes of length and basically it goes through the basic high points of your written report and it’s supposed to convince me that you’ve analyzed it well. So. Again, in a corporate setting, you would give your presentation to me. You’d hand me the written report with more details. I would review that and decide if I think it’s a good idea. The last thing you’re gonna do is a small prototype. The prototype should be covered in your presentation. The prototypes spend about two to four hours on it. It shouldn’t be too much, but for example, if you’re writing about doing some stuff in AWS, I would expect your prototype would be setting up a virtual environment in AWS just to play around with it, something like that.

So for the presentation itself, you’re going to submit a prerecorded video of your presentation. You can use tools like Zoom to create that really easily, or there’s tombs in both OneDrive, or you can grab OBS, anything you’d like. You’ll submit that by uploading it to Canvas, or you may have to upload the video to OneDrive if it’s too large to put on Canvas. But all you have to do is record yourself and then upload that along with your written report for this project.

So last big thing in this class, I will send out T-Vals for this class. They’ll be sent out sometime during finals week. As always, I encourage you to respond to the T-Vals honestly with all your feedback. Remember that T-Vals are anonymous and I cannot access them until after grades have been submitted for this class. All comments and feedback are welcome. This class especially changes a lot over the time. It’s a really different class experience, and so I’m always looking for feedback of things I can improve or do better. So please feel free to be honest on your T-Vals and let me know if you have any comments. And then once we get to finals week, final grades will be posted on Canvas by the Tuesday after finals week. I will email everybody once those are posted. If you have any concerns with your final grades, let me know and I can take a look.

So other than that, hopefully things are going well. We’ve got good discussions on Discord and EdSTEM if you have questions. I also still have one-on-one office hours so I’m available anytime. Otherwise, best of luck. I hope you feel like you’re getting there. You’ve solved the puzzle of this class. If you have any questions, just let me know. Otherwise, best of luck and I will see you in a couple of weeks.