Fall '21 Week 3
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Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. So this week you should be wrapping up lab one. If you need graded, feel free to go ahead and schedule a time on my calendar for today. If you haven’t already, I think I’ve got everybody covered at this point, but just checking to make sure. That will cover the first lab. And then the next assignments are due, I believe Monday September the 20th, where you will have the first discussion prompt that is due and the second lab that is due. For the discussion prompts, all you have to do is go through and watch the video of our guest speakers from the summer, and then respond to a few of the questions I’ve posted in the discussion. Also, if you have any questions you’d like to ask that speaker based on what you’ve learned, feel free to let me know I can get you in touch with all of our guest speakers from the summer, they are more than happy to chat with you. But really all you have to do is write a short response to the discussion prompt, I’m hoping each question will get a couple two or three sentences in your response, just to show that you’ve watch the video and really thought deeply about it.
So for lab two, you’re going to be redoing basically everything you did on lab one, but this time, instead of doing it manually, you’re going to use a tool called puppet to automate a lot of that. So for lab two, you’re going to reinstall your operating system in a set of new VMs. You’ll install puppet in those VMs, run all the updates and everything. And then you’re going to make a snapshot in VMware. And it’s very important that you make that snapshot so that you can roll back to it as you do your testing. Then for the rest of the lab, you’ll simply write puppet manifest files to do the updates, test your manifests by applying them manually to those systems. And then you can roll back to that snapshot, make changes and try again, a couple of hints make sure you save your puppet manifest outside of your VM so that when you roll back to your snapshot, you don’t lose any of your changes you make to the file. And also make sure you try and keep it simple. These are not meant to be too terribly difficult or complex. So feel free to use tools such as puppet resource to query the system, get a set of outputs that show how it’s configured. Minimize that to just the changes you want to make. And then you can use that to build your manifest file. Good solutions to this lab usually are about 200 lines of code or less. So if you’re getting into the 1000s of lines of code for this puppet manifest file, you’re probably making it way too difficult. And try and keep it simpler. If you have any questions, let me know I’m happy to help you through this. I also will talk really briefly about grading it’s in the lab as well. But when I grade these, what I will do is I will take your puppet manifest file, I will run it on a clean VM that I have. And what I will do is I will run it, reboot the VM, run it again. And then I will check to see if it does what it should. The reason I run it reboot and run it again is because some group permissions on Linux don’t get applied correctly the first time. But after reboot, they will take effect and then the rest of it can happen. So that’s the process I use for grading. Also, for lab two, you don’t need to do live grading via zoom, you can just submit your manifest files via canvas. And I will grade those after the due date. So feel free to do that. Although if you do have questions, you can always schedule a time to meet with me.
That’s really it for this period. Things seem to be going really well in this class. I haven’t had a whole lot of questions. So I think everything’s going well. Feel free to keep in touch. We can have discussions on discord, you’re welcome to join us for tea time office hours, either Tuesdays at 330 or Fridays at 1030. You can schedule a one on one office hours with me anytime on calendly. You can also email me directly and I’m happy to answer. So as you work on lab to hopefully your reaction is kind of like this where you’re like “seriously, I have to do this again?” But that’s kind of the point a lot of system administration and especially as you watch our speakers from last summer, they’re going to talk a lot about the importance of automation in System Administration. And so that’s where we’re going with this lab is now we’ve done it manually. Let’s see if we can automate it to make it a little bit better. So good luck on this lab and I will see you again in a couple weeks.