Fall '22 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one Announcements video for CC 510. In Fall 2022, I’m Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester, my contact information is here. It’s also on the syllabus, it’s easy to get ahold of me. For this course, email is preferred. So please email me at russfeld@ksu.edu. But you can also chat with me on Discord, I’m @russfeld. Most of you have already posted You’re welcome there, which is great. So feel free to use Discord as well in this course, but if you need an official email, email is always preferred.

So in this course, there are good modules on canvas. There are seven modules in total, which means there’s roughly one module due every other week, please go through and check the due dates that are posted on Canvas so you know exactly when things are done. For most of the lab assignments in this course, we’re going to do live grading, so you’ll schedule a time to meet with me via zoom. Usually, it only takes about 15 minutes, but I’m going to just ask you to share your screen on Zoom and ask you a few questions. And have you walked me through what you did in the lab so that I can see that everything’s working correctly. That’s by far the easiest way to grade this course. So watch out for some information about that as you complete the first lab. We also have some discussions in this course. Um, for some of the discussions, I’m going to reuse the videos from previous summer. For other questions, I’m probably going to actually go through and invite those speakers to come back. So watch for some information coming up about that here in the next couple of weeks to see if I can get a few of our speakers to come in and do a live discussion for us as well. And then finally, in this course, you’ll have a final project that you get to work on to really demonstrate your skills and explore a little bit deeper into an area of system administration that you’re interested in.

So like I said, for communication in this course, we have discord, it’s a great place for questions, discussions, et cetera. I may post some news articles and things there as I see them throughout the course. So feel free to use discord either in the chat channel or you can DM me on Discord if you have something you’d like to discuss their email is great for personal issues, grading questions, to dues etc. One thing I will say about discord, I get bombarded with notifications in discord and I tend to miss things. So if you want something on my to do list and email it to me, I will guarantee that I do see email. So make sure that you do that. Email is the official record for this course. But Discord is a bit more flexible. So I offer both options.

So in this course to be successful, you really have to come in with a growth mindset, there’s a lot of learning that you’ll have to do. And a lot of questions that I posed that are very open ended. And so you’ll have to spend some time not just reading and watching and stuff, but engaging reading some of the additional content that I link. And I really encourage you to try and work iteratively try and do little bits of the lab, make sure that everything’s working before you move on. Make sure you save early and save often as you’re working with things either on your config files or by making snapshots new virtual machines. And the other big thing is, don’t be afraid to ask for help, I’m going to ask you to do things in this course that can be very difficult. And so if you find yourself getting stuck and spinning your wheels for about an hour or so that’s a good opportunity to just take a step back, ask for help. Because I don’t really expect everybody to do everything in this course without maybe getting stuck at least once in needing to ask for help. So don’t be afraid to seek my help if you get stuck.

So like I said lab grading, you’ll be able to schedule that via Calendly. So you can go to my Calendly link that’s in every email signature. It’s also on Syllabus, it’s on the homepage, schedule, about 15 minutes via Calendly for grading, you can schedule your grading time before the lab is complete, you just need to have the lab completed by the time that happens. So if your schedule is a little tight, you can go ahead and schedule a time for a week from Friday for lab one and have that on the calendar. Generally, to schedule the account only requires two to four hours notice. So if it is Friday at three o’clock, and you want to schedule a meeting for four Calendly is not gonna let you do that. So make sure you schedule a bit in advance. We’re going to use Zoom, we screenshare on this. And the other big thing about live grading is once we start grading the lab, you cannot change things. So if we get halfway through and you realize you did something wrong, it’s too late, you can’t change it, I have to take it as you submitted it at the beginning of that grading period. So just bear in mind, make sure that you’re done with the lab, you might notice things that you did wrong as I go through the grading, but unfortunately, you’re not allowed to change it once we get started. If you have any questions about the lab grading, please let me know.

So discussions in this course, in summer 2021, I had a bunch of guest speakers come in and do some really good interactive discussions with the class. And I’ve got those videos. And so you get to watch those videos and write some reactions about those. I am in the process of asking a couple of those speakers to come back and do a live discussion later this fall for you. So watch out for some emails about that I’ve got two or three people in mind that I’d like to bring back in and have a have us do a live discussion. If you have any questions about that process, email me and I would be happy to explain it.

So that’s really all I got for this week. You’ll expect to see an announcements video for me probably not every week in this course. I’ll probably post an announcements video every other week to go along with the modules. So those announcements videos will most likely be posted on Tuesdays every other week as you start a new module, so watch out for those other than that you can keep in touch by chatting with me on Discord. I also host the tee time office hours for the department which are currently Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. But watch for a survey we may be adjusting tee time a little bit. And you can always schedule a one on one office hours with me using my Calendly link. I’d be happy to chat. So other than that, good luck this semester. I wish you the best of luck. Hopefully everything goes well as you get started on lab one. I will look forward to probably meeting most of you on zoom here in the week or so as you get ready to get lab one graded. In the meantime, if you have any questions, let me know

Fall '22 Week 3

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2022. Hopefully today you’re wrapping up lab one, if you haven’t already, make sure you schedule the time to meet with me to get that graded. That’s due tonight by 7pm. And then we’ll start launching into module two. The week two quizzes are due next Monday. And then lab two is due the week after that along with the second week’s discussion, which is actually the first discussion for this semester.

So for this semester, our first speaker is Seth Galitzer, I’ve got a video that I recorded about a year ago of Seth talking about some of his experience in system administration. He actually has a bachelor’s degree from computer science at K-State. He’s been our system administrator in our department since 2006. So over 15 years at this point, he manages all of our computer science systems, all of our labs, including all of the servers and all the research systems that we work with. Seth is obviously a very important person in our department. And he speaks a lot about his experience and what he does working in system administration. So take a look at that video, you’ll be able to watch it, I’ll have some questions that will have you answer. And then you’ll also have an opportunity to ask a few questions for Seth, I have gone back and talked to all of our speakers from previous semesters, and they have agreed to come in and answer some more questions. So I will make sure that that gets taken care of.

So this next lab, you’re going to basically redo lab one using Puppet, the whole idea behind lab one was to get everybody started with system administration by installing operating systems and VMware and setting everything up. Now we’re going to delete all of that. And we’re going to do it again. But this time, we’re going to use puppet to automate that whole process. So one big important part for lab to make sure you make a snapshot after installing your operating system in puppet so that you have somewhere that you can roll back to. And then throughout the lab, what you’re going to do is work on your puppet manifest file tested, see what it does and enroll back to that snapshot, make sure you save your puppet manifest file changes outside of the VM, because when you roll back to that snapshot, it will delete that file. So make sure you save that elsewhere and keep that outside of the VM. So you’ve got it.

One big thing is try and keep it simple. Do not try and make this overly complicated. A good solution for this is about 200 lines of code. So it doesn’t have to be that big. One thing you can do is use the puppet resource command that I show in several of the videos to query the system. So you can set the system up manually the way you want it. Use puppet resource to see what that looks like as puppet. And then you can copy paste a little bit so that that you need to actually regenerate it into your puppet manifest. That’s really all I’ve got for this week.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch by discussing things on Discord or scheduling one on one office hours with me. I’m always happy to chat. If you get stuck on this lab, you can ask me any questions. But other than that, hopefully you’re feeling like oh, I have to do this. Again. That’s part of the point of system administration is figuring out how we can take something that we do manually and then automate that so that we can do it in a very dependable and reliable way so that all of those computers are going to be set up the exact same way. Best of luck on lab two. Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple of weeks.

Fall '22 Week 5

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week five announcements video for CC 510 In Fall 2022, this week you should be wrapping up lab two, which was technically due yesterday. So hopefully you got that submitted discussion. One was also due yesterday. So make sure that you’ve watched that video and responded to those questions, you can also ask a few more questions that you’d like me to send on the Seth and I will try and get some responses for that. Next Monday, the quizzes for lab three are due. And then in two weeks, lab three will be due as well as the second discussion prompt. So make sure you’re keeping track of that all of this can be found on the modules and Canvas. So it should hopefully be easy to keep up with.

So for lab two grading, I posted this in an announcement last week, it’s Canvas only you just upload your manifest files, and then I will take care of grading them offline. So no meeting is required for lab two, unless you have questions, what I will do is when I see you submit lab two, usually within a day, I will go through and add a point so that you can get access to the model solutions, you can always go directly to the textbook at textbooks.cs.ksu.edu and start working on the next content, even if it hasn’t unlocked yet. So don’t be afraid to go ahead and do that if you’d like.

So the speaker for the second round of speakers is Dr. Gary Pratt. He is the K_State Chief Information Officer,or CIO, since 2017. He started in that role right before the Hale library fire. For those of you that might be aware there was a fire and Hall Library in 2017 or 2018. Somewhere around there, it didn’t directly damage any of the IT systems, the fire was actually in the roof. But as they were trying to put out the fire, a lot of the water went down into the basement. And that’s what really ruined a lot of the central IT systems. So they had this big recovery effort that he talked quite a bit about. He oversees all of K-States and for information technology, all of their resources, everything. And he’s really responsible for a lot of the big picture and long range planning stuff that goes on around K-State IT. So it’s really interesting to see Seth looking at a very small a department level support. And then talking to Dr. Pratt and the big picture stuff that goes on at the CIO role, just to compare and contrast those different backgrounds.

So this week, you’re going to start working on lab three, I would say lab three is probably the first of the two hardest labs in this class. lab three, we’re going to spend a lot of time working on networking. So we’re going to set up some core network services on your systems. We’re going to set static IP addresses and learn all about networking and IP addresses and the seven layer OSI model, we’re going to spend some time installing both DNS and DHCP servers, we’re going to install an SNMP server so that we can use that to query information about our systems, make sure that you take a look at some of the hints and diagrams at the end of this chapter. There’s some really helpful things in there that will help you get started and help you debug some of these things.

And then, of course, the big thing with lab three is don’t be afraid to ask questions. Part of this class is really an experiential class where you just have to dive in headfirst and try and sometimes you’re gonna get stuck. And that’s okay. And so usually what I tell students, if you’re stuck, and you haven’t made any forward progress for about an hour, that’s a good opportunity to take a step back, ask me questions, see what you’re doing. And then hopefully, I can help you get past that. It generally shouldn’t be that hard to do any of this. But if it’s your first time, there are an awful lot of wrong ways you can try and do it. And so you’ll spend a lot of time trying different things, reading documentation until you figure out that pathway that works correctly, and be able to get it set up and working.

So as always, with this class, don’t be afraid to keep in touch. There’s lots opportunities for discussions on Discord. I also have my one on one office hours available. So you can always sign up for those, just use the Calendly link in any of the emails are on the syllabus. And I’d be happy to meet with you and chat about this class any time. So we’re at the point where hopefully now we’re going to start networking our systems, I think it’s a really exciting place to be for System Administration. Networking is really a large part of what we do today in system admin. It’s really an important thing that makes our computers much more useful when they’re networked together. Um, so this lab I think is really important but it also can be really difficult. So best of luck to us. You dive in on this one, let me know if you have any questions and I will see you again in a couple of weeks.

Fall '22 Week 7

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week seven Announcements video for CC 510 In Fall 2022, this week, lab three is due. So hopefully you’re getting that done and turned in and have a scheduled time to meet with me for grading. If not, make sure you get that done ASAP. So you can keep moving ahead in this class, you also should have been completing discussion to which is due on Canvas. So get the responses in and your questions for our speaker and I will work on getting those answered. The lab for quizzes are due later this week. And then next week, you’ll be working in lab four to turn in the week after that.

So for lab three grading, I’ve got a lot of things I’m going to look at hopefully this is pretty clear from the lab. Basically, I’m going to have you test your remote connections between your two VMs. We’re going to check for your static IP on Ubuntu, we’re going to check your DNS and DHCP settings. And then I’m going to look at the snapshots for the screenshots for SNMP and Wireshark. So to be successful in these labs, one of the big things is you have to read the labs very carefully and use the posted hints to your advantage. You can also use the resources. A lot of times in each task in the lab, I link some resources that have instructions that you can follow to get it set up. The big thing I will tell you is take some time to ask some questions and don’t spin your wheels. If you feel like you’re not making progress and you’re stuck on something, that’s a good chance for you to step back and ask me a question. I really don’t expect anybody to make it all the way through this class without asking me at least some questions or getting stuck at some point. And so I’d much rather you take the time, ask some questions and work with me to get over the hump. Instead of spinning your wheels and getting frustrated. That’s not really how this course is designed. So feel free to take advantage of me as a resource. And let me know how I can help.

So your next speaker you’re gonna get to interface with is Kyle Hutson. He’s one of the Beocat admins here on campus, he helps manage his K State supercomputer which if you’ve been in the engineering building, you’ve seen that big supercomputer next to a lot of the classrooms. He’s got a lot of experience working with very large, very powerful hardware. And he has some really good views on things such as working in the cloud versus versus working on premises and how that hosting changes. Specifically when you’re working with things like scientific computing workloads, instead of your standard web server workloads. So Kyle has a lot of good things to say. So I hope you enjoy listening to his talk and then coming up with some questions that you’d like to send to Kyle.

So for lab four, we’re going to shift gears a little bit. And now we’re going to work on authentication. In lab four, we’re going to set up our first VM for Windows Server, and then we’re going to configure it to have an active directory domain, we’ll add our Windows client to that domain so that we can log in on Windows using the user accounts in the domain, we’ll do kind of the same thing on Linux where we’ll set up open LDAP. And we’ll add a Linux client open LDAP and get that to log in there. And then we’ll also configure one level of interoperability where we’ll have an Ubuntu VM that can log in via the Windows Active Directory. So begins for lab four, as always make snapshots before you try anything, specifically make a snapshot before you promote your Active Directory to a domain controller. Sometimes that process doesn’t work. I think it’s about one in 10, that that fails, and so have a snapshot. So you can try that again. Likewise, on the open LDAP side, especially when you have to go in and add the security certificates and everything to LDAP. I tend to screw that up every once in a while I’m maybe one of three that I actually get it to work the first time. And it’s really hard to undo once you started. So make snapshots of your LDAP servers and your Active Directory servers every time you get to a good stopping point. And then you can always roll back to those snapshots if you need to, to undo anything and try it again. So that’s really what’s lab four m lab four is generally regarded as the most difficult lab in this class, it may not necessarily be the most time consuming if everything works correctly, but it can definitely be very difficult. So take your time, make sure you have lots of time to work on this lab. If you get stuck, feel free to ask me questions and I’d be happy to help you out.

Once we get past this, we’re going to go to lab five. Lab five kind of has two parts now where we start by talking about cloud resources, working DigitalOcean we’ll set up SSH and firewalls and things there. And then we’ll take a little side detour and talk a lot about Docker. And so we’ll set up a Docker host on there. And we’ll also set up a Docker reverse proxy. And so lab five kind of has two parts to it. They’re both pretty straightforward, but it’s a lot of new content. It’s probably stuff that a lot of you’ve never worked with before. So once we get in the lab five and a couple of weeks, you’ll get to see some really exciting stuff.

That’s really all I’ve got for this week. As always, you can keep in touch. We’ve got good discussions on Discord. I’ve got my one on one office hours. I also have my in person Office Hours Mondays from 11 to noon in the computer science conference room. So if you’re on campus, you can catch me there. If you’re off campus and want to join those office hours, let me know and I can set up a zoom session for it. But that gives you at least one hour a week where you can find me actually in person and ask me some questions as you work on the labs. So hopefully this labs not too frustrating but I know definitely when I worked with Active Directory and LDAP sometimes I feel a little bit like stitch here and I get a little frustrated. So hopefully everything goes well with this lab but if you do get stuck, feel free to take some time ask me some questions. I’d be happy to help and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks to get lab for graded

Fall '22 Week 9

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week nine announcements for CC 510 in fall 2022. So this week, lab four is due, I believe most of you scheduled time either yesterday or today to get lab four graded. So good job on that. Hopefully that’s all working well. And then you’ll also start working on lab five content this week. Next week, lab five, you’re going to be working on it, it’ll be due the following Monday. And there’s also the third discussion in this class, which becomes due very shortly.

So for lab 4 grading, for those of you that haven’t done lab 4 grading, it’s really simple lab for pretty much either works or it doesn’t. So what I want to see is that you’ve got a Windows Server with Active Directory, and that you can log in from windows onto your Active Directory, you’ll also have an open LDAP server. And you should be able to log in on Ubuntu via LDAP. And then also you should have another snapshot on Ubuntu that allows you to log in via Active Directory, that’s really all it is. And then there’s a couple of screenshots. Generally, it either works or it doesn’t. I tried to do my best if it doesn’t work to give partial credit. But if it works, that’s great, you should know it works. And it will be very easy to great.

So again, success in this class, especially in these labs, make sure you’re reading the lab assignments carefully. There’s a lot of hints and tips in there that I dropped pretty carefully to make sure that you’ve got them. Read the diagrams, if I leave any network diagrams or have any different hints on troubleshooting, don’t be afraid to use your resources, a lot of times the labs have a linked resource in there. That’s usually the resource I used when I tried to do this myself. And then of course, if you get stuck, if you’re not making any progress or spinning your wheels for about a half hour or so that’s a good chance to step back and ask me a question. Don’t try and just force your way through it. Because sometimes it is very possible for you to reach a situation that even I can’t fix. And so I feel really bad if you try and spin your wheels and try and get past something that really is an unsolvable problem. So don’t be afraid to reach out and ask questions if you get stuck.

So starting this week, you’re going to work on lab five, lab five, we’re moving everything to the cloud. So you’re going to create a couple of droplets on DigitalOcean, you’re going to set up SSH and firewall on those droplets, you’ll set up some simple websites using either apache or nginx, you’ll set up a DNS name so that you’ve actually got a domain name that you can access them. And then new this past summer, I added some Docker stuff. So you’ll actually set up a couple of Docker containers and a Docker reverse proxy as well on one of those sites.

So to get access to this, one of the things I highly recommend checking out is the GitHub education pack, which you can find it this URL, there’s also a trial on digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer, I apologize that got cut off, where you can get up to $100 of free credits for a new DigitalOcean account. If you need help, you can ask me for credits. In general, even if you have to pay for everything outright between your two DigitalOcean droplets and your domain from Namecheap. It should cost no more than $11. But again, if you need help getting credits, or you need some sort of alternative plan for this, please let me know I really want to make this work. The other big thing about this don’t delete your VMs just yet, we will go back to those VMs in lab six. But lab five is just going to be setting up this cloud infrastructure. So that’s what we’re going to do right now.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord, you can schedule a one on one office hours with me, I’m always available to help. So don’t be afraid to take advantage of that. And then of course, we’re moving into the cloud. So the big thing to keep in mind is the cloud is just somebody else’s computer. XKCD does a really good job of describing some of this. So it’s really fun to go back and read some of these comics, especially once you start to understand what’s going on in the cloud. So as always, if you have any questions, let me know and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks.

Fall '22 Week 11

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week 11 Announcements video for CC 510 In Fall 2022, this week, you should be wrapping up lab five, which was due yesterday. So if you haven’t already, make sure you schedule a time to get lab five graded. You’re also should be looking at the third discussion in this class, which is due next week. And then you’ll be starting on lab six with quizzes due next week and lab six itself being due the following week.

So for lab five grading, it’s actually very, very simple. Usually lab five is one of the fastest to grade, basically, I just want to see you be able to ssh from your system to your front end system, and then SSH from your front end to back end in the cloud. We’re going to check the firewall, the date and time and a few things on both of those systems. We’re going to look at your Apache, your DNS configuration, your HTTPS, make sure all your certificates working. And it will also check out your Docker reverse proxy. A lot of it is if it works, it’s great. It’s very easy to do. If you have trouble, you can let me know. And we’ll try and debug it and figure out what’s going on.

So for lab six, we’re going to do a lot of different things on your local VMs. We’re going to work on file servers and drive mappings. So you’ll set up Samba on Linux, you know, setup file sharing in Windows, you’ll also set up drive mappings on both clients attached to those parts of lab six required the lab for the Active Directory working for the Windows side, the Linux side, you don’t actually have to have LDAP working as long as you have the same usernames and passwords everywhere it will work, you’re also going to set up an application server. So on Windows, we’re going to install an application server in IIS and a database and some things there. on the Linux side of things, we’re going to do this in the cloud. So you’ll build a couple of working web apps out in the cloud.

The other thing you should be thinking about at this point is your final project. There’s lots of details out on Canvas about the final project, the basic idea is to either build something new or fix something existing that is related to it and System Administration. Some examples are maybe designing a web resource for new startups. So you’re talking about building out the web resource, maybe Docker containers or Kubernetes, load balancing things like that. You could look at setting up laptops for school and doing some automation around puppet and some of those tools. You could design a central authentication system for a company would use Active Directory and LDAP. And how would you integrate it with different things you could look at using thin clients versus thick clients and labs thin clients would be if you’re on campus, DUE 1113 where you remote desktop into a large server versus stick clients is where you have a desktop of some kind in every spot. Lots of different ideas for your final project. Feel free to chat with me if you want some ideas or to get an idea of things that you might be able to do. Basically, the big thing for the final project is you’re going to do a SWOT analysis a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis of the idea of what you’re proposing. And then you should do some small proof of concept that shows that you’ve tinkered with it a little bit. It doesn’t have to be at the same scope as your final project. But it should be something in that same realm. So again, if you’re not sure what to do, feel free to chat with me and ask me questions. And I’d be happy to help you get to a final project.

As working on this, don’t forget, if you don’t have it already, you can sign up for the GitHub education pack using this URL. Both DigitalOcean and Name Cheap, have really cheap stuff or free stuff depending on how you get there. Generally, you should be able to get whatever resources you need for this class as well as your final project for next to nothing. So make sure you look at those resources and let me know if you need if you have any questions or need a referral code or anything like that.

Otherwise, just feel free to keep in touch on Discord on email. You can schedule a one on one office hours, I’m always here to help. Otherwise, we’re getting near the end of the class. We’ve just got two labs left in the final project. So hopefully things are going well. As always, if you have any questions, let me know and I will see you again in a couple weeks.

Fall '22 Week 13

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week 13 announcements for CC 510 in fall 2022. So this is a list of everything that’s remaining do in this class. For the rest of the semester, we’ve got lab six that’s due today, you’ve got a discussion that’s due after Thanksgiving, your final project proposal is due after Thanksgiving. And then we have lab seven, discussion, five. And the final project I’ll do right around finals week. So there’s really not a whole lot left in this class. As long as you’re keeping up. Hopefully, you can get everything taken care of. But this gives you an idea. All of this is on Canvas as well.

So for lab six that you’ll be getting graded. Today, you’ve got a Windows file server and an Ubuntu file server that you’ll be setting up in your virtual machines, you’re also going to have a Windows web application that’s set up on your Windows Server in your virtual machine. And then you’ll be setting up a cloud web application either in Docker or across your to DigitalOcean droplets, depending on which option you choose. Again, most of this lab six grading is just checking to see if everything’s working correctly. So if it’s working and you know it’s working, you’re probably be fine. If you’re having issues, I can work with you to see what’s going on and see if we can debug it. For lab seven, lab seven is kind of a catch all of a bunch of things left in this class. So we’ll spend a little bit of time playing around with backups and restoring from backups. We’ll spend a little time doing some monitoring. And we’ll talk a little bit about DevOps. Each of these are just kind of independent things that I wanted to add to the end of the class so that we got some of these things covered as well.

So for the last discussion in this class, your speaker is Hunter Guthrie Hunter is a plant system administrator for energy at the Wolf Creek Nuclear Generating Plant is a former student that took the CIS 527 version of this class a few years ago, he works in a really highly secure industry working in energy production, especially the nuclear generating facility. And so he’s got a different view on system administration from his world where security and reliability is key. So I think his insights are really interesting. So I hope you enjoy his discussion.

So hopefully, by now you’ve been thinking about the final project, the information is out on canvas. Basically, remember, your final project is to build something or fix something it related, it could be any number of things. So chat with me if you need any ideas for your final project. What you’re going to be turning in for your final project is a written report, there is a template that you can use. The template has bullet points in it, but please remember your port should be written report, it should not be a list of bullet points. Basically, in your report, you’re going to research and propose your idea. Make sure you give me all of the framing and background I need to understand your idea and understand that you understand your idea. Then you’re going to perform a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You can include graphics and data as needed. I expect each element of your SWOT analysis to have, you know, three to five points that you make underneath that. So three to five strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You’ll also give me a presentation, it’ll be about 15 to 30 minutes going through your research your proposal, your SWOT analysis. The overall goal for this is to convince me that you’ve analyzed this project well, and that you’ve leveraged the things that you’ve learned in this class, to actually demonstrate your ability to do some stuff it related.

The other thing you should demo during your presentation is a small prototype, it should be pretty easy. It should be somewhat related to your project, but it can be a small scale version of your idea. Ideally, you should spend only about two to four hours working on your prototype. It’s not meant to be that much. But I at least want you to get something hands on with something that we maybe haven’t done in this class. So your presentation can be given either live or you can pre record it using zoom or OBS or any other tool you have. You need to present honor before the Friday of finals week. And please check my schedule this semester because I’m in charge of the CIS senior project course. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday finals week are already booked up for those presentations. And Monday and Friday slots are going fast. So if you want to present on finals week, please take the time to schedule now if you want to do a live presentation, or consider doing a pre recorded presentation that is submitted on or before Friday, if you need alternative arrangements, if you work during the days, things like that, please email me and let me know sooner rather than later so I can get those arrangements made.

Other than that, please feel free to keep in touch. We’ve gotten discussions on Discord, you’ve got office hours, there’s lots and lots of ways you can get in touch with me. So please make sure you take advantage of that. But other than that you should be working on your presentation you’ll probably end up with a PowerPoint or two. So don’t forget to include those in your presentation. If you have any questions let me know otherwise I will see you again in a couple of weeks and I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving and a good Thanksgiving break.

Fall '22 Week 14

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week 14 Announcements video for CC 510 in fall 2022, so remaining in this class, there is a discussion that was due yesterday. Hopefully you got that done and submitted along with the questions for our presenter. The final project proposal is due this Friday, so make sure you’re working on that final project proposal. It’s just a short one page that explains your project and kind of tells me you’re on the right track and can work on it for the last two weeks of the class. Lab seven is due the following Monday on the fifth, and we’ll talk about lab seven and just a bit. And then on finals week, there’s a discussion due on Monday and your final project is due on Friday of finals week. And then finally, don’t forget, there are tevals coming as well.

So for labs have been grading to make things simplified, I have adjusted lab seven so that no in person meeting is required. For part one, you just submit your screenshots on canvas. For part two, you submit a zip file and a readme. For Part Three, you just submit the URLs for your monitoring system as long as it’s working. And for part four, you submit your GitLab repository, you’ll need to add me to that so that I can see it, my username is the same as my email address. And then you’ll also send me your URL of where it gets posted. And then for extra credit, you’ll send me the screenshots of that system working as well. So everything for lab seven can be uploaded via Canvas, and then I can grade it there. So that way you can turn in lab seven, as you get done with different parts of it, you can submit multiple times. So feel free to do that just to get parts of lab seven done as you get toward the end of the semester.

So for your final project, there are three things that you’ll need to complete. The big thing that you’ll turn in is the written report, there is a template I’d like you to use that kind of outlines the different sections that you’ll need. To be clear, the template uses bullet points to describe what goes in the sections. You are not to use bullet points for your sections, you should use full paragraphs for these. What you’ll basically do is research your project proposal and then do a SWOT analysis. When I grade these, I usually look at two things. I’m looking at your proposal, how well did you describe the background, the scenario and what your proposal is so that I can understand it? And then how well does your SWOT analysis match what you proposed and how I would understand it, and I would analyze it as an IT person. In your project, you can include graphics and data as needed. So if there’s anything I need to see or understand or any charts that might be useful, you can include those. The second part you’ll do is a presentation, your presentation is 15 to 30 minutes, it’s basically going over what’s in your written report. So your presentation will describe your project, go through your SWOT analysis, and then give me a summary. One big thing that a lot of people leave out on these projects is the summary. At the end of a SWOT analysis, I want you to tell me whether you think this project is worth doing or not. So your your SWOT analysis should lead to a strong conclusion of something like based on the SWOT analysis, I believe, or I do not believe we should continue with this project, I really want you to try and sum it up and use that SWOT analysis to convince me as your CIO or it reviewer that your project is worth doing or not worth doing. So that’s the big thing there. The other part of your final project is a small prototype, it should be very easy, it’s just something related to your project. For example, if your project involves hosting servers on AWS, your prototype might be spinning up a small AWS server. If your project is about using Ansible. To deploy systems, you might play around with a simple Hello World and Ansible I expect you to spend no more than about two to four hours on your prototype. And basically, during your presentation, you’ll just show your prototype as a short little demo. That’s really all you have to do.

So the presentation itself, I give you a couple options, you can give your presentation to me live via zoom, or you can pre record it and submit the recording to me via Canvas. If you want to present live, you need to schedule a time to present to me using my Calendly link, please schedule a full half hour for that block. If it’s recorded, I want you to schedule time to meet with me for q&a. The q&a should be after you’ve submitted your recording, so I have time to watch it. But your q&a time only needs to be 15 minutes. But either way, I want to interact with you a little bit either after your live presentation or after I watch your recording. Please, please go schedule these. Now. One of the things you’ll run into is because I’m taking care of the senior project class this semester, my Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, finals week is already fully booked for those presentations. So I really only have Monday or Friday of finals week, and Friday is going to fill up quickly. So feel free to grab those times that you want now, so that you’ve got your time booked, regardless of what you’re doing. If you need alternative arrangements, if your schedule changes, if things get weird on finals week, let me know I do have a little bit of availability in the evenings for a couple of these. So I could do some on me in the evenings, probably Thursday and Friday of finals week, and maybe also Monday finals week. So let me know if that becomes useful. But please get on top of scheduling your presentations now so that you can get that taken care of.

Also in this class, we’ll be sending out tevals or teaching evaluations these will be done electronically. They will be sent out soon. So watch your email for those. Please take the time to respond honestly and give any feedback you have both good and bad, all of your feedback and comments are welcome on this class. It’s something that I really, really take very seriously. It helps me improve this class, it helps me know what things I need to change what things I need to do differently. I wish I could tell you how much this class has changed over the past several years that I’ve taught it. But all of those changes are really coming from those tevals. So please take the time, give me your honest comments and feedback. Anything that you want to see changed anything you like anything you dislike, all of that information is very helpful for me as I continue to improve this class.

And then finally, as we get to the end of the semester, final grades will be posted in Canvas. So check your canvas and make sure that all your grades there are accurate. If you have any concerns email me sooner rather than later so I can get those adjusted. Once we get to the end of finals week, I will be very unlikely to make changes to grades. So if there are any concerns now please let me know. In all of my classes, once grades are finalized in Canvas, you will receive that one final email from me that says the grades are finally in Canvas. And what you see in Canvas is what gets submitted to cases later that will get processed on your transcripts. So take a moment now to look at your grades, make sure everything looks correct. I’m going to be going through those and making sure that those are accurate as well from my end of things, but let me know if there’s anything wrong with their grades, we can get that fixed ASAP.

Other than that, this is probably the last Announcements video I’m going to make this semester. If you have any questions or concerns you can keep in touch by emailing me. You can join discussions on Discord you can schedule a one on one office hours with me. I’m available all the time. I’m happy to help answer questions. It’s been a real pleasure having you all in this class. And so I hope things go well. But now you’re at the end hopefully feel like you’ve solved some problems and you’re you’re cheering at the end of the semester. You’ve only got a few things left in this class. But as long as things go well hopefully you will continue to enjoy what you’re doing. As always, if you have any questions, let me know and I look forward to seeing you again in the future. Best of luck.