Fall '26 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CIS 527 and CC Fall 10 in fall 2026. Once again, my name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for the semester. Um, maybe at this point you’ve watched the course introduction video. I just got done recording that. Um, that video is scripted for the most part, and so you’ll get a more robotic version of me in that video. Um, these announcements videos are not scripted. Um, all I do is I write my slides ahead of time, and then I work my way through the slides. So you’ll see a little bit more authentic version of me in these announcements. Um, I highly, highly recommend watching these announcements every time I post them because they have the most recent information and the things that are front of mind for me as I’m going through this class. So if you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out anytime. My email is here. Uh, you can find me on Ed Discussion, on Teams, on Discord. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of, uh, especially because I work from home most of the time. Uh, so feel free to reach out anytime if you have any questions.

I also have one teaching assistant this semester, uh, Sicheng Chen. Uh, Sicheng is a new teaching assistant to this course, but he’ll be getting up to speed over the next few semesters. Uh, and you’ll probably interact with Sicheng, uh, as you go through getting some of your labs graded. Um, so feel free to reach out, but if you see Sicheng, uh, posting on anything, uh, he’s one of my TAs that’s helping out with this course.

So like I talk about in the, uh, introductory module, this course is, uh, gated modules on Canvas. There’s one module due every other week. There’s seven modules in total plus a final project at the end. Uh, the due dates all should be current for everything throughout the class through the semester, so you can pretty much set your calendars at this point. Uh, I don’t anticipate moving too much on the course right now. Um, for lab assignments in this course, big thing you need to know is we do live grading for the lab assignments, which means you will join a Zoom, share your screen, and we will walk you through the things we want to see as you’re grading the lab assignments. Um, we expect you to be able to demonstrate the things we ask you to do. Um, for example, the first lab, I’m going to ask you to show me that you created the user accounts you’re supposed to create. You should know on your computer where to go to show us that, that you did that step, things like that. Um, other big thing we do in this class is discussions. Uh, I try and bring in a few guest speakers every semester. I’ve got four scheduled right now, and I’m still waiting on the fifth one to get back to me to get a date locked in. Um, but I will post that as soon as I have that. Um, for these discussion sessions, and I’ll talk about them more as we get closer to that, um, basically, uh, you will have a week ahead of time to read their bio on LinkedIn and prepare some questions you’d like to ask that person. Um, then we’ll have a live session on Zoom. I really want everybody to attend the live session on Zoom if you can, but I know that it may or may not work in your schedule. And so either attend the live session in Zoom and ask your question there and you get points, or afterward you can write a response to that after you watch the video, and the response will be the proof that you watched the video.

And then lastly, there’s a final project. It’s posted right up front. You can start reading it right now. I encourage you to be thinking about the final project as you go through this class. Uh, but most students start really working on the final project as we get toward November. So don’t worry about it too much right now. Um, like I said, for this course, we use Ed Discussion. That’s probably the best place to get help in this course. I will try and be pretty active on there. Um, you might see me posting some random news articles and things that I come up with. Uh, and I’ll probably create some mega threads out there for different lab assignments, so it’s a great place to get help. Um, anything that’s not course-related or if you have a grading or to-do thing or something that shouldn’t go in Ed Discussion, um, please email the help address. It’s res, uh, cis527-help@ that long address. Uh, if you’re in webmail, any of the K-State email systems, and type cis527-help, it will auto-complete that for you, which is great. Um, I always tell students email is official. Ed Discussion is much more flexible for this course, so that’s why we like to use that. So big thing about this course.

To be successful in this course, you need to come in with a growth mindset. Um, this is a system administration course, and it’s particularly difficult to teach because if I tell you how to do everything that you’re supposed to do, then the lab assignments become very trivial. And so instead, I tend to give you a desired outcome for the lab assignment, and then it is up to you to read the documentation, read the resources that are available to you, and use your brains to figure out how to achieve that outcome. Um, in this course, every page has a lot of links. Those links are important. Those are the links I used when I was creating a lot of this course content, and it usually has a lot of tips and tricks to complete the assignments buried in the links. So don’t expect my textbook to have everything that you need in it. You really need to go back and read the documentation, read the tutorials, um, work through that process. Um, that’s really a lot of what you do as a sysadmin. There’s not one manual that tells you how to do everything. You have to put all of these things together. Um, another big thing in the labs, work iteratively. Um, the labs can take anywhere from one to six hours plus to work through. Um, so don’t try and do the lab all in one shot. Don’t be like, “Oh, Friday, the lab’s due tomorrow. I’m gonna start working on the lab today.” Um, there is a reason that I give you two weeks to work through the labs. Um, I can work through the labs in about an hour each because I have a lot of experience, and I’ve done this before. Uh, most new students that don’t have experience tell me it takes about six hours to do some of these labs. Um, and then the other big thing about this class is I do not expect anybody to make it through this class without asking for help at least once. Um, there are times where something’s not gonna make sense, or you will break something in a way that you can’t fix it, and you need to work with me or Sicheng to get that fixed. And every semester, there are one or two students that manage to break things in a way that I can’t figure out how to fix it either. And, um, so the other big thing is save early and save often. Um, the VM software that we use has snapshots. Think of those as quick saves if you’re a gamer. Um, anytime you’re gonna do something that you’re like, “I don’t know if I’m gonna do this right,” quick save before you try it so that you have something you can roll back to. Um, don’t be the student that learns the lesson the hard way that you get to rebuild your VMs from scratch because you broke something. But every semester that happens, so be warned.

Like I talked about before, lab grading, uh, you’re gonna schedule. It says Calendly. I have switched to Microsoft Bookings for me. I don’t know what Sicheng’s gonna use yet. Um, when you’re scheduling lab grading, check Sicheng’s schedule first and schedule with him if he’s available. Um, if he’s not available, then check my schedule. I will mostly be available Tuesdays and Thursdays in the afternoons, I think, but I’m still working on my semester schedule. Um, you can schedule your grading time before you have finished the lab. So if you’re working on the lab and know you’re going to be done at a certain point, you can schedule your grading time. Just make sure you’re done with the lab before your grading time starts. Um, other big thing to be aware of, my calendar requires at least four hours advance notice to schedule a meeting with me. So if you get done on Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, don’t expect that you can schedule a meeting at Wednesday afternoon at 4:30. Um, that just prevents things from showing up on my calendar last minute while I’m trying to work on stuff. Um, and then the other big thing about lab grading is when we start the lab grading process, you can’t make any changes once we start. Um, so if you open up a text file and be like, “Oh, crap, I, I missed that,” it’s already too late. We’re grading it. Um, but we will work with you to fix things that we find once we’re done with the grading, so be prepared for that.

Talked about discussions already. Um, like I said, you submit questions online, uh, participate or write responses. Uh, the first discussion will be coming up here in, uh, early September. I believe the first one is, uh, Seth Galitzer, who is our former CSS admin. Great person to talk to. He’s talked in this class almost every semester I’ve taught it. Um, so you can go back and watch some of the old videos from Seth, but I’m really excited to get him to come in and talk about his experience now that he’s moved into engineering support and has a little bit different role within the department. Um, so I’m really excited about some of the discussions we have coming up, so look forward to those this semester.

Other big new thing this semester is I have adopted a generative AI policy. Um, generative AI was not necessarily an issue the last time I taught this class, which was in fall 2025, but I want to get out ahead of this and make sure that everybody knows what my expectation is. Um, in general, most of this class is going to be in the yellow category, which means you’re totally allowed to ask gen AI questions. I mean, every Google search at this point is a gen AI prompt. Um, but what I don’t want you to do is h- is be like, “Hey, gen AI, write me a Biden config file for this thing.” Um, you can ask it questions, but I want you to actually go through the process of building the configuration files, doing the steps, making things work. Um, don’t just have AI do it for you because you’re not learning anything by that. You’re just being like, “Oh, AI can make this file.” And then, of course, if something is wrong, you won’t know why or what’s wrong. So that’s the general idea behind gen AI.

As far as my use of gen AI, I do not believe in using gen AI whenever I’m communicating with somebody, and so any email that you get from me, any of these announcements videos, that is all me. That is my voice. That is exactly, uh, my text. It is written by me. Um, so any communication you get from me will be no gen AI whatsoever. Um, any grades that you get will not be gen AI. Any grading feedback you get, that will not be gen AI. Um, I do reserve the right to use gen AI for code review and feedback of large projects. Um, that’s not really a thing in this course. It’s mostly targeted things like senior project where I get, you know, 20 or 30 students that have these huge senior projects. I may use gen AI to review those. I don’t anticipate needing that in this course. Um, and then I do, uh, reserve the right to use gen AI to produ- produce learning content. Uh, mostly it’d be graphics and situations and things for lessons that we might do in the future. Um, but as of right now, I have not used gen AI at all in this course. There’s no gen AI content present, and if there is any gen AI content in the future, it will be clearly marked. You’ll be able to see it. But, um, rest assured that any email you get from me, any communication from me, any videos from me, that is pure me. That is exactly what you’re getting. Um, I believe that I’m your instructor, and you’re paying for my interactions and my expertise, and so that’s what I’m going to give to you.

So last big thing this semester, um, feel free to keep in touch. I will post in the discussion. I’m available on Teams and Discord. Uh, we’re gonna try and have some tee time office hours in the semester. Uh, if you’re not familiar with tee time, it’s an open office hours period where you can come in and talk about life, the universe, and anything that’s bothering you. Um, I’m a big believer that college is not just the classes you take, but the experiences and the life things that you can learn along the way. And so I am more than willing to offer up my life experiences and my advice and my ability to work with students if you have any questions about anything that you want to know. Uh, and a lot of other CS faculty and advisors feel the same way. And so we’re going to try and have some open office hours where we can have those types of discussions, which I think are a really valuable experience in college. Um, and then of course, you can always schedule one-on-one office hours with me. My calendar is available. You can schedule with me anytime during the working day, or, uh, if you work a particular schedule and need time on nights and weekends, just email me and let me know. I’m happy to meet your schedule as long as I can. Um, just know to make those requests in advance, but, um, I’m happy to do that.

So that’s all I’ve got on my mind right now. This first announcements video is usually the longest one in the semester, um, but it’s a good chance for me to just talk through anything that’s going, uh, through my mind right now. Uh, I’m working on this about a week before class starts, so hopefully all of this is still current by the next time you see it. Um, the only big thing I haven’t done yet is finish up the CourseDog syllabus for this course, but it’s gonna have the same content that the old syllabus had. So, um, hopefully I shouldn’t run into any problems with that. Um, otherwise, good luck this semester, and I look forward to seeing all of you in the class this semester. Uh, you’ll probably get weekly announcements from me at least every other week, probably every week, depending on how things go. Um, but best of luck, and I will see you again soon.

Fall '26 Week 2

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• Slides

Video Script

00:00 Hello and welcome to the week two announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So hopefully you’re getting started working on Lab 1. Lab 1 is going to be due, I believe, next week sometime. So make sure you’re getting that worked on. For grading in this class, we do, for a lot of these labs, we’re going to do an in-person grading via Zoom. So the way this works is to get your lab graded. You schedule a time slot via our Calendly links. Please look at Sicheng’s Calendly link first than mine. I will get Sicheng’s posted later today so that it’s on the syllabus and on the homepage. If Sicheng is available, I’d prefer that you schedule with Sicheng first. If not, feel free to schedule with me. What you’re going to do is you’re going to make snapshots of your VMs and have those booted and ready to go when you connect to the Zoom. And then I or Sicheng is going to walk you through the things that we need to see on the rubric. You should know how to show us those things. So if we ask you, show us how all the user accounts that you created or show us that this user account is in this group or show us the permissions for these files, you should know how to do that. The lab has all of that in there.

01:09 We’ll be prepared in the background. We can direct you if we need to. But make sure you have everything ready to go. Make sure you’re ready to demonstrate it. And then you’ll just join the Zoom, share your screen, walk us through everything. It usually takes about five to 10 minutes if everything’s working. And as long as you can demonstrate you did the lab, you’ll get all the points. It’s pretty straightforward. If things don’t work, we’ll do our best to try and get you some partial credit. We may have to take some additional time to look at stuff. The other thing is if something is really screwy, Sicheng may refer you to me. That’s totally fine. We’ll work through that. But as long as you get your lab actually graded before the due date, you won’t have any problems at all.

01:36 So other big thing coming up in this class, we’re going to have five discussion sessions where I bring in a guest speaker to talk about their experiences industry. The full schedule is now posted on the homepage on Canvas. You just scroll down to find the section on discussion sessions. The way those work is you need to submit an assignment to ask two questions for the person that’s coming in. I will post their bio. I’ll post their LinkedIn link. Try and write those questions specific to that person. It’s really kind of disappointing when I get a question of, you know, what’s one thing you wish you would have done differently in your career? It’s a fun question, but try and come up with something that’s unique and interesting to their background and to what they’re coming to present about. So you’ll submit two questions before. And then the second part is you can either attend the live session on Zoom, which I would really prefer if you can make it. And then during that, you get to ask one of your questions. And as long as you attend live and ask the question, you’ll get your credit.

02:28 If you’re not able to attend live or you attend, but you don’t ask a question, afterward, you can watch the video and then I’ll have some prompts to respond to just to show that you watched the video and actually got the content that we have in that discussion. So hopefully that makes sense. It’s pretty clear. It’s on the Canvas homepage as well. This is going to start September 16th. We have our first one on September 16th at 2.30, which is Seth Galitzer. Seth is a former computer science sysadmin. Now he works at the engineering IT services as their sysadmin. So Seth’s going to come in. We’ve got some really cool speakers. We’ve got a couple of repeats from previous semesters, and I’ve got three new speakers this year that I think are going to be a lot of fun. So make sure you watch for that.

03:08 Other big thing to remember is to get help in this class, please remember to email the cis527-help email address. That goes to both me and Sicheng, so you’ll be likely to get a faster response. You can also post an Ed discussion. There will always be a mega thread for all of these labs and Ed discussion and it’s a great way to see if your question has been asked before. That’s really helpful for me just to keep everything in one place. And then of course, if you want to schedule with me, you can schedule with either Sicheng or I using our Calendly links that will be on the Canvas homepage and on the syllabus. I’m switching from the Microsoft booking tool back to Calendly. So if you find the booking tool, it will still work, but I’m going to switch back to Calendly because I’m frankly kind of frustrated with Microsoft offering. So I’m going to switch back to Calendly because I’m frankly kind of frustrated with Microsoft offering. So I’m going to switch back.

03:48 So that’s really all I’ve got for this week. Normally in this class, you’ll probably see announcements video like this every Tuesday. I may skip a week video. There’s nothing new to add, but generally I’ll try and put out a video every Tuesday. So if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Otherwise, good luck this week, and I will see you all again next week.

Fall '26 Week 3

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• Slides

Video Script

00:00 Hello and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So this week, Lab 1 is due tomorrow night. I set the due date at 7pm just because I’ve got a few people that need to meet with me after 5 because of their work schedule. But make sure that you get Lab 1 graded by tomorrow evening. Remember, for grading on this lab, you need to schedule a time with either me or Sicheng get lab one graded by tomorrow evening. Remember for grading on this lab, you need to schedule a time with either me or Sicheng to get it graded. And then please remember to check Sicheng’s calendar first and schedule with him first and then schedule with me. If he’s not available during times that you’re available, that’s because I’m paying for Sicheng’s time and I want to make sure we use his time wisely. And so I’d prefer if you schedule with him first before you schedule with me just to share the load a little bit. And because I’ve got other things going on, but my schedule is also open as well. More today than tomorrow. Most of my slots tomorrow are already filled up. But if you haven’t scheduled yet, please make sure you do that ASAP on either Sicheng’s calendar or my calendar. Then coming up next week, we’re going to have our first discussion session, and we’ll talk about that here in just a second. And then you’ll start working on Module 2 and Lab 2.

01:08 So like I said, for this class, we’re going to have some discussion sessions. These are chances where I get to bring in folks from the industry to talk to you about their careers working in IT and related fields. Generally, these are going to be Wednesdays from 2.30 to 3.30. And so I kind of use these as some office hours times. I have sent speaker invites. I have filled out the schedule. So if you look on the Canvas homepage, you’ll find the dates of all of the speakers and who they are. I’m working on getting bios and LinkedIn links for everybody. And our first speaker is coming up on Wednesday, September the 16th. And that will be Seth Galitzer. Seth Galitzer is an engineering IT manager. He was formerly the computer science system administrator for almost two decades, I believe. He’s a K-State CS grad from a little bit before my time even. Seth has been around forever. He’s one of the best IT people I know. He’s very knowledgeable, and he is somebody that you’ve probably heard from or interacted with in your career as well. He’s going to come speak to our class about his career as a IT manager on campus. This will be on Wednesday, the 16th at 2.30 PM. Remember for the speaker sessions, there are two things you need to do to get credit.

02:11 The first thing you need to do is before we meet with the speaker, you need to ask at least a couple of questions on Canvas. I think it’s like two or three questions that you want to ask the speaker. So read their bio, read their LinkedIn, come up with some questions that you think would be interesting to have that speaker answer. Try and customize them to the speaker. That’s really helpful. And then you can either attend the session live on Zoom and hear from Seth and ask him a question. And if you ask him any question, you’ll be able to get full credit for attendance. Or if you’re not able to attend or if you attend to it, you’re not able to ask a question. Then you can watch the video afterward and write a short little write-up that shows that you watched the video and paid attention to it. And I’ll ask some prompts there. But by far, the easiest thing to do is to come to the session, sit there, join us in the audience, give Seth somebody to talk to, and then join the discussion afterward. That’s a really great thing to do. So we’re moving on to Lab 2. Lab 2, the point is to redo Lab 1 using Puppet. So what we’re going to do is do everything she did manually in Lab 1. We’re going to redo that using a Puppet script. So for Lab 2, you can delete your previous virtual machines. You’re going to make two new virtual machines.

03:16 You’re going to reinstall the operating system. You’re going to install Puppet. We’re actually using an open source version of Puppet that has a different name that I talked about in the assignment. So make sure to check that out. And then you’re going to make a snapshot of your operating system once you get Puppet installed. Then the process is work on writing your Puppet manifest file, test it in your VM, and then roll back and try it again. One thing I will remind you, if you make any edits in your VM, when you roll back to before you made that edit, all those edits go away. So make sure you keep a copy of your manifest file outside of your VM so that you don’t lose your work. Every semester somebody makes this mistake and I’m trying to warn you right now, remember that any edits you make in the VM will be lost when you roll back. Just remember that. The other big thing on these manifests is keep it simple. If you use the puppet resource command to query your system, only grab the things that you know you need to set. You don’t need the full resource output, just the important things. And so the solutions for this can be less than 200 lines of code. I think my solution is under 100 lines of code, actually. So they don’t need to be very complex. They just need to be very detailed and very correct, but they don’t need to be very long.

04:23 So you can work on that. Other big thing to keep in mind in this class is a growth mindset. The labs in this class are challenging. They’re meant to be challenging, especially in this class. As we go on, I will give less and less detail in the assignment descriptions itself, and I will write the assignments more and more as a outcome that you should reach, not a process to get there. It’s up to you to figure out the process. So I really to you to figure out the process. So I really want you to make sure you’re taking the time to read the linked documentation, doing some searching on your own, asking me for clarification if anything doesn’t make sense. And then of course, remember, I’m giving you two weeks to work on these labs for a reason. So make sure you start early on them, work methodically, make snapshots, and ask questions if you get stuck. So other than that, hopefully things are going well. If you have any questions, there’ll be a mega thread on ed discussion that you can always participate in. I also have one-on-one office hours. You can schedule with me using Calendly. There’s lots of ways you can get in touch and stay involved in this class. So feel free to reach out anytime. Otherwise, hopefully you’re not too disappointed that you have to basically do Lab 1 again, but I think it’s a really nice comparison to do Lab 1 manually and then have lab to write a puppet script to do it automatically, which is something that you do in a larger industrial setting. So that’s really what we’re going for here. As always, if you have any questions, let me know.

05:35 Otherwise, best of luck and I will see you again next week.

Fall '26 Week 4

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• Slides

Video Script

00:00 Hello and welcome to the week four announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So this week you should be working on Lab 2. The Lab 2 quizzes are coming up very soon, so make sure you get those done. Next week is when Lab 2 is actually due. And then we also have the first discussion, which is going to be coming up not this week, but next week. So make sure you’re watching out for that. Quick aside for Lab 2. Hopefully everybody got through Lab 1 grading. Hopefully that went really well with everybody. For Lab 2 grading, you only have to submit your Puppet manifest files via Canvas. You don’t have to schedule a meeting unless you really want to go over something. We’ll just grade those manifest files offline for lab two. So a little bit of a reprieve from all the scheduling for lab two. We’ll go back to the scheduled gradings again in lab three. Coming up, not this Wednesday, but next Wednesday, this was rescheduled to next week, we’ll have our first discussion speaker, which is Seth Galitzer. Seth is an engineering IT manager and formerly the computer science system administrator for over 15 years, I believe, probably almost 20 years.

01:05 He’s a K-State Computer Science grad. He’s going to be here to talk to us about his experience in industry and some of the cool stuff he does today as an Engineering IT Manager. That will be Wednesday, September 23rd at 2.30 p.m. via Zoom. So please make sure you join that. Also coming up next Monday is a Tea Time Office Hours where we’re going to have career prep and an industry panel. That’s Monday, September 21st at one o’clock PM on campus in the CS Student Lounge, which is 1118 or available via the Tea Time Zoom link. You can find that on our Discord channel. It’ll be posted there very easily to find. We’ve got some representatives from different industry panels coming in to talk about their experiences in industry, hiring trends, career fair prep, anything that you might want to know. So I encourage you to come join us for that. Again, that’s next Monday, the 21st at 1 p.m. in 1118 or via Zoom. So that’s really all I got this week. It’s pretty quiet. Next week, I’ll probably give you some more hints on Lab 2 if you’re still working on that. But otherwise, feel free to keep in touch on Ed Dis discussion or via office hours and let me know if you need anything.

02:08 Otherwise, good luck. And I will see you again next week.

Fall '26 Week 6

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Video Script

00:00 Hello and welcome to the week six announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So this week, hopefully you should be working on wrapping up the first discussion. If you weren’t able to attend the discussion video last week, you’ve got until the end of today to watch the video and respond to some prompts to show me that you watched the video. Also today, you should be turning in the quizzes for Lab 3. Those are due at the end of today. Next Tuesday, we’re going to have our second discussion section, which I’ll talk about in just a second. Lab 3 is actually going to be due Monday, October 12th. It was originally due on October 9th, which is a Friday, but that is Wildcat Pause Day, and so none of us will be available to grade the lab. I’m going to move it back to Monday, so you get a freebie weekend because it lines up with Wildcat Pause Day.

00:48 So for Lab 3, hopefully you’re getting started on Lab 3. It’s all about core networking services. You’re going to set some IP addresses on your VMs, install a DNS and a DHCP server, install and configure an SNMP server, and do some work with Wireshark. This lab does get a bit more complicated than the previous couple of labs, but I do provide a lot of hints and diagrams and even a video walkthrough of what the lab should look like. So if you’re unsure about anything you’re working on in Lab 3, please ask questions. We are happy to help. Like I tell a lot of students in this class, I do not expect you to get all the way through the class without asking at least some questions. So don’t be afraid to ask questions if anything doesn’t make sense or is unclear as you work on Lab 3.

01:29 So for Lab 3 grading, we’re going to go back to the in-person grading via Zoom. Make sure you’re scheduling your grading meeting before the due date. Please bear in mind that Friday the 9th is Wildcat Pause Day, and then Monday the 12th is my day on campus, so I’m very limited on availability those days. Check my calendar and check Sicheng’s calendar. Go ahead and grab a time on either of those calendars if you know you’re going to be done with the lab before those dates, so that we have those in our schedule. You can always do that as long as you’re done with the lab. For grading, we’re going to check a few things. We’re going to check that we can remote connect between the two systems using Remote Desktop and SSH. We’re going to confirm your static IP on your Ubuntu server, look at some DNS and DHCP settings, have you demonstrate SNMP or show us a screenshot of SNMP, and have you show us your Wireshark snapshots as well. So make sure you have all those prepared. Once we get on with Lab 3, we’re going to start working on Lab 4, which is about Windows Server and Active Directory. I’ll talk more about Lab 4 in a week or so as you get closer to that. Generally, most students will tell you that Lab 4 is the most complicated lab in this class, so we kind of have it loaded in the middle of the class. But as always, if you have questions, you can ask.

02:40 So, a big reminder for success in this class: make sure you read the labs carefully and work very methodically. Make sure you look at all the posted hints and resources. A lot of times in the labs, I have links to the resources that I read when I’m trying to do these labs. So there are a lot of times first-party documentation or what I think are really helpful tutorials for this. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. And then, of course, the big thing I tell students is don’t spin your wheels. If you feel like you’ve been doing the same thing over and over again and not making any progress for about an hour, it’s a good opportunity to take a step back, ask me some questions, and get some help. Don’t just spin your wheels and get frustrated for several hours when you’re not making forward progress.

03:20 So coming up next week on Tuesday, we’re going to have another guest speaker in this class. We have Scott Finkeldei coming in. Scott has been working at K-State IT for over 25 years, I believe, probably closer to 30 years at this point. He currently works in educational technology and is the Canvas admin, and is one of the people who oversees a lot of the educational technology we use at K-State for our teaching and learning. I think it will be really interesting for you to hear from the administrator of a lot of the tools and technologies that you interface with as a student. It’s also a lot of the technology that I work with as a faculty member. Scott’s going to be coming to us next Tuesday on the 6th, at 1 o’clock p.m. in the afternoon via Zoom as usual. Remember, for the discussion sessions, you need to have a set of questions submitted before that date. Then you can either attend the session on Tuesday and ask a question, or watch the video afterward and respond to a few of the prompts that I’ll put up, just to show you’ve watched the video. Those are the things that you need to do to get credit for these. Other than that, hopefully things are going well. If you have any questions, reach out on Ed Discussion or Teams. You can also come to office hours or schedule office hours with me. I’m always happy to chat. Otherwise, hopefully you don’t find this lab too frustrating. I know, especially when you’re working with DNS and DHCP, there are a lot of fun and interesting ways that it can go wrong. So best of luck. Be careful as you work through this lab. Feel free to ask for clarification if anything doesn’t make sense. And best of luck. I will see you next week.

Fall '26 Week 8

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

[00:00] Hello and welcome to the week 8 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So coming up, we’ve got the discussion to response that’s due pretty soon this week, so make sure you get that turned in and updated. I believe that’s due on Thursday. The Lab 4 quizzes are due on Friday. Next week on Wednesday, we have our third discussion session, which I’ll talk about briefly. And then at the end of that week, Lab 4 is due. So you should hopefully be starting on Lab 4 soon.

[00:31] Lab 4, you’re going to add a Windows Server VM and configure Active Directory and LDAP. You’ll also configure clients and some interoperability on that lab. Big advice I can give you on this lab is to make snapshots, especially before you promote a Windows Server to an Active Directory client, before you configure OpenLDAP, and before you configure SSL in OpenLDAP. All of those tend to cause issues, and so make sure you make those snapshots just so you can roll back in case you have any problems. So for Lab 4 setup, there are three different options. If you take a look at the textbook, there is a page that shows some networking diagrams. If you’re confident with your DNS and DHCP server from Lab 3, you can continue to use those in Lab 4. You can also set up static DNS entries in Lab 3, and you can actually set up host file entries for Lab 3 as well. So if you don’t have your DNS server working, you can set up some static DNS entries as well. Doesn’t really matter as long as you can get everything to work and as long as each machine can find each other. If you have any questions on this setup, let me know. Hopefully your DNS is working, but if not, feel free to reach out.

[01:33] Another big thing to bear in mind is for Lab 4, those of you that are using ARM platforms, so specifically the Apple M2 chips, M1 chips, those things, unfortunately, Windows Server does not have a virtualized version on ARM right now. They had a demo version and it is no longer available. For this lab, you’ll need to use Azure for the Windows Server portion of this lab. You’ll also use it again in Lab 6, so be aware of that. There is a textbook page with a video that goes through the process of setting up an Azure virtual machine for Windows Server. That video, I believe, should be current. If you see anything different or anything that doesn’t make sense as you walk through that video on Azure, let me know, and I’ll go through the process again on my end and make sure that they haven’t changed anything since I recorded that video. But that’s the big thing to be aware of. And so for Lab 4, you’ll kind of have a split setup where you’ll have your Ubuntu stuff locally and your Azure Active Directory stuff in the cloud should hopefully be pretty straightforward to do.

[02:29] For Lab 4 grading, this one’s actually pretty simple. We’re just going to check and make sure that your Active Directory and OpenLDAP is set up, it has the correct users and groups on it, and that you can connect the clients to the appropriate system. So Windows will connect to AD, and then you have an Ubuntu that connects to LDAP and another Ubuntu, usually a snapshot of the same VM, but it could also be a separate VM that connects to Active Directory. That’s what we’re really looking for Lab 4.

[02:56] Also coming up next week is our third speaker session. The speaker this time is Kyle Hudson, one of my favorite speakers to bring in this class. Kyle currently works at Lambda. I believe they’ve changed their name now to just Lambda instead of Lambda Labs. He previously worked at KANREN, which is the internet service provider for K-State, and formerly was a Beocat sysadmin for about 10 years. Kyle is an immense expert on high-performance computing. He tells some of the best stories about high-performance systems. So I encourage you to come join that session. He’s going to be with us on Wednesday the 21st at 2 30 p.m via the usual Zoom link. Usual rules apply. Submit a question beforehand so you get points for that and then either attend the live session and ask a question or do the response afterward to get points for that. Other than that, hopefully things are going well. We’re at the halfway point of the semester so if you have any questions feel free to reach out on Ed Discussion, come to office hours, find me on Teams, anything like that, and I would be happy to help. Otherwise, best of luck, and I will see you again next week.

Fall '26 Week 10

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

[00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Week 10 announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2026. So, this week you should be getting started on Lab 5. The first round of Lab 5 quizzes are due this Friday, as well as your response to the third discussion session that we had last week with Kyle Hudson. So make sure you work on that. This lab actually has two sets of quizzes. So the second set of quizzes on all of the Docker stuff is going to be new next Wednesday on the fourth. And then on Friday, November 6, we’re going to have the fourth discussion session, which we’ll talk about briefly. And you should also be getting graded for Lab 5 by Friday, November the sixth.

[00:46] So for Lab 5, we’re going to move some stuff into the cloud. For this one, you’re going to create two droplets in the cloud using DigitalOcean. These will both be Ubuntu droplets. You’ll set up SSH and Firewall and some simple websites running Apache. You’re also going to set up your own DNS domain name to point to those websites. And you’ll set up a Docker reverse proxy so that you can talk to Docker containers that are running up in the cloud. This lab, I think, is kind of a welcome diversion from some of the other stuff. It’s generally a little bit easier of a lab, but it gives us some setup for some of the things we’re going to do later on in Lab 6 and Lab 7.

[01:13] So Lab 5 grading is pretty simple. What you should be able to do is SSH from your computer to your front-end droplet. And then from that droplet, you should be able to SSH to your back-end droplet. But you should not be able to access your backend droplet from the outside. It should only be accessible via front end due to private networking and firewall rules. We’ll check your firewall, your date and time, and some other things, and we’ll actually check all your websites to make sure those are working. So double-check all of that. One thing you may run into is if you’re working from campus, you cannot SSH out from campus. So you either have to use some sort of a VPN to get out of campus, or you’ll have to just work off of campus’s network. It’s the same problem that some students would have had for Lab 4 if they’re working in the cloud for remote desktop. So just be aware of that. If you’re working from on campus, you may run into some SSH problems. You can do a lot of the work in DigitalOcean’s virtual terminal. That does work as well, but I do want you to at least test SSH outside of that terminal at least once.

[02:10] So for this slide, you’re going to set up a couple of cloud services. They’re hosted on DigitalOcean.com. Unfortunately, DigitalOcean has done away with their really cool trial offer. They used to have a trial offer you could get up to $200 credits for free. I could not find any active trial offers for DigitalOcean available this time other than a $5 offer for new accounts. I do have a referral code for DigitalOcean if you want it. I don’t think it gives you anything on your end, but I think if you spend enough money, it does give me something on the back end. So it does help out that way. So if you want my DigitalOcean referral code, let me know. You can also go to Namecheap and specifically you need to go to nc.me, not the main Namecheap website. But if you go to nc.me, there is an offer there for university students to get one free .me domain name for a year. So you can do that. If either of these are going to be a problem for you, either running stuff in DigitalOcean or signing up for Namecheap or anything like that, let me know. I have ability to either create services on my account that I can cover, or I can set you up as a sub-user under my accounts and do it that way. Generally for each student, the total cost for running all of this for these labs should be about $11. You’ll spend about a month’s worth of DigitalOcean credits on two $5 droplets. And in Namecheap, I think it’s $1 to reserve your domain name, if that. So in total, I’m only asking you to spend about $11. But if that does present a problem or you have any issues, let me know. I do have workarounds for that. Just reach out and I’d be happy to help out with that.

[03:40] Other thing you should be thinking about is your final project. Don’t forget there is a final project in this class. The module is open on Canvas, so you can always go take a look at that. The final project in this class is mostly a thought exercise. The idea is you’re going to come up with some IT project, and following along, especially with the stuff we heard from Scott Finkeldei, you’re going to go through the process of proposing that IT change and then analyzing it as an IT project. So your IT project could be building something or fixing something that’s broken. It could be speccing out a web resource for a new startup. It could be setting up laptops for a school, a central authentication system for a company, debating whether you want thick clients versus thin clients in computer labs, et cetera. You know, anything vaguely IT is fair game here. So if you’re having trouble coming up with a final project idea, now is the time to schedule a time to chat with me for some ideas. You’ve got until around Thanksgiving to officially propose your final project. And then what you’ll do is you’ll do analysis and a write-up of that project. You don’t actually have to be able to do the final project that you propose, but you will do some small little proof of concept where you play around with the idea. But you can propose things that you can’t physically do. You just have to be able to analyze them and convince me that you understand what you’re doing.

[04:58] Last up, we have our fourth discussion session coming up here on Friday, November the 6th. We’re going to have one of my good friends, Jordan Wheeler, come in and talk to you. He is a Navy veteran. And since he graduated from K-State many years ago, he’s been working as a cloud infrastructure engineer and a software developer, mostly in the startup scene. So he’s got a little bit of a different view on things working in startups versus large companies. But he does a lot of stuff with cloud infrastructure, Docker, Kubernetes, all of this fun stuff that we’re going to be learning in Lab 5. So Jordan’s going to come in and share some of his expertise and background working in those systems. And that is going to be a week from this Friday on November the 6th at 2.30. So pay attention to that. Other than that, hopefully things are going well. As always, if you have any questions, you can ping me on Ed Discussion, come to office hours, schedule a one-one office hours time with me. I’m always happy to help. Otherwise, hopefully things are going well. We’re over the halfway point. We’re at week 10 of 17 of the semester. So hopefully things go well as we get toward the end. But as always, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, good luck, and I will see you again next week.