Fall '21 Week 9
Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. So you’re working on lab five, right now I was able to get lab four graded for everybody. And it looks like that went well. Lab five is where we pivot into the cloud, which we’ll talk about in just a second. And then also don’t forget, every other week, you’ve got a discussion response due so if you haven’t done that yet, go watch the video from the previous semesters, discussions, and then write up your short response.
So for lab five, we’re moving into the cloud, the cloud has become a big part of system administration, and it’s something that we definitely need to spend some time on. So what we’ll do in the cloud, we’ll set up two droplets on DigitalOcean. A droplet is just a small virtual system that they set up for you. And then on that system, we’ll set up SSH, so we can remotely access to it, we’ll set up a firewall, we’ll set up a couple of simple websites using Apache. And then we’ll also connect it up using a real DNS name so you can access it through the internet, just like any other website.
One of the things you may want for this is to sign up for the GitHub education pack, you can get that at education.github.com/pack, it really helps if your GitHub account is set up using your K-State email address. So the.edu email address. Even if you don’t get the pack though, a lot of the things that it offers are still for free online, for example, on DigitalOcean if you go to try it out, digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer or many many other URLs, you can get sometimes up to 100 dollars of free DigitalOcean credit, which is more than enough for this class. Also, for NameCheap, if you go to nc.me, not the normal NameCheap website, but specifically nc.me, you can get a 1 dollar DNS name as long as you sign up with your .edu email address. If you need credits, I’ve got some referral credits for both of these services as well. But even if you have to pay for everything outright, your total cost throughout the semester should be about $11. It’s really not meant to be that high. The other thing I do say if you don’t want to work in the cloud services for any reason, because it’s university, I can’t force you to use some of these cloud resources, I do have alternative plans. So if you really don’t want to do this in the cloud, and you’d rather do this on your own systems, let me know and I can arrange for that as well. But I really do recommend learning how to do this in the cloud. I have also talked to some students, I prefer DigitalOcean for this, if you’d rather do this on tools, such as Amazon web services, or AWS, that’s fine. Everything I have is written for DigitalOcean. It’s the system I understand the best. But I have had students use other services successfully in this course for a lot of this setup. So it’s kind of up to you how you would like to do that.
So when we get to lab five grading, the big things I’ll have you show me are your ability to SSH from one of your systems to the front end. And then from the front end, you should be able to SSH directly to the back end, you’ll set this up using SSH keys. So it should be really easy to do. On both systems, we’ll check the firewall we’ll check the date and time and some other settings. And then we’ll check your Apache websites, your DNS and make sure that your HTTPS is set up correctly with the certificates through certbot. So it’s pretty easy to grade there’s not a whole lot to lab five. If you get done early with it, that’s great, just let me know and I’ll get you graded, so you can move on to lab six.
Also, at this point, we’re halfway through this semester, so you should be starting to think about your final project. The big overarching idea behind the final project is to choose something that you want to build or choose something that already exists that you want to fix. And then what you’re going to do is you’re going to perform a SWOT strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis on that proposal. The key here is you do not have to actually do what you propose. Which means you can propose things that are bigger in scope or more complicated than what you can actually achieve. But what I’d like you to be able to do is do the research and do some preliminary work to understand exactly what you’re proposing, what the impacts of it are, and how it would impact the larger organization that you’re proposing it within. So that’s kind of the idea. Some projects that I’ve come up with over the years that might be interesting would be building a web resource for new startup companies. So thinking about how you get a high availability website, maybe if you need to do some processing or some data manipulation back there. Maybe designing a process to set up new laptops for a school. So looking at into some automation, like what we did in lab two, and also some inventory management tools that we haven’t talked about yet. You could look at designing a central authentication system for a company so taking what we did in lab four with Active Directory and LDAP and building that out into more of an industrial setup. You could also look at proposing thin clients versus thick clients in computer labs. Thin Client is a small system that then remotely connects to a larger central server. If you’re familiar with how we have campus setup, it’s 1113. One of our computer labs err 1114 one of our computer labs is thin clients where some of our other labs have thick clients, full desktops. There’s tons of ideas out there, I’m happy to chat with you if you’re not sure what ideas are available or what might be interesting to you, so just let me know if you need some help finding an idea for final projects. I really encourage you to think about your environment and things that you’re familiar with. A lot of times some of the best final projects come from systems or ideas that you’re already familiar with. And then extrapolating on that to fit some of the things we did in this class.
So that’s really all I’ve got for this week. As always, you can keep in touch I’m on discord, you can join me for tea time, you can schedule one on one office hours, whatever help you need, just let me know. Otherwise, we’re over halfway through the semester. So it kind of feels like we’re nearing the end. Hopefully you do well in lab five. We’ve just got two more labs after that to go and then your final project. As always, if you have any questions, let me know otherwise, I will talk to you in a couple weeks.