Fall '23 Week 8
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Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week eight announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. So this week you should be wrapping up the second discussion. We had Adam come in and talk about his work on Beocat. So hopefully you’re getting a response put together for that. Also due tomorrow are the quizzes for Lab 4, so hopefully you’re getting those done. And then next week by Wednesday Lab 4 is due, so hopefully you’re able to get started working on that. So some quick hints real quick about success in this course because I get asked this question every once in a while. Things that you can do to be really successful in this course is to read the lab assignments very, very carefully. There’s a lot of information in there, but there’s also a lot of hints in there about ways to do things or pitfalls we’ve run into. Those red and green and blue boxes are things that I’ve added in over the years that I think are very helpful. The linked documentation is also very helpful. A lot of times the work you’re trying to do in the lab can be accomplished by following that first or second documentation link and following the steps there. I try and post them in the order of relevance, so most likely start with the first one. It will probably answer most of your questions. But if you do get stuck in this class, if you’re not making forward progress after about an hour or if something breaks and you can’t figure it out, that is a great time to take a stop and ask questions. There’s a lot of things both Matt and I know how to help you with that it’s just impossible for us to explain in the class. For example, things like how to check your system log, how to restart services and look for bugs and how to look at these config files and see what’s going on. Especially with Lab 4, you have to be diagnosing network issues and also looking at domain issues and trying to get your certificates to work. There’s a lot of intricacy in Lab 4. If you get stuck, don’t spin your wheels. Please come talk to us. We’ve got a lot of time. Matt will be having office hours on Thursday during the one o ‘clock time. I should be there as well for a little while. Hopefully, you can use some of these tips to be successful in this course.
For Lab 4, we’re going to start working on authentication. For Lab 4, you’re going to be working on authentication. to create a new virtual machine using Windows Server. Windows Server is kind of a fat VM, so beware. It does require a lot of RAM and quite a bit of storage space, so hopefully that works out for you. What you’re going to do in Windows Server is you’re going to create an Active Directory domain, which is the default standard for what most systems use for this. K -State CS, even though we’re a Linux system, actually uses Active Directory as K -State does as well. On the Linux side, you’re going to create an open LDAP server, which is kind of the Linux open source equivalent of this. And then for each one, you’re going to configure a client that connects to those systems. And you’re also going to configure a little of interoperability, where you have an Ubuntu client that logs in using an Active Directory domain on Windows. As before, the biggest thing I can tell you in this lab is to make snapshots. Some of the times that are really useful to make snapshots are on your Windows Server before you promote it to an Active Directory domain controller. That process fails maybe one out of 20 times. And so every semester, there’s at least one student where that process fails. Just go back to your snapshot and try again. Same thing with OpenLDAP, the process that usually fails is adding the TLS certificate to the LDAP server. So make a snapshot before you start that process. Thankfully, the process is mostly just following the instructions and mimicking the commands from the guide. But if you screw something up, it’s much easier to roll back and try again, then to try and figure out what happened and debug it and undo it. So use the snapshots very wisely as much as you can in Lab 4.
Once you get done with Lab 4, you’re welcome to push right ahead and go to Lab 5. Lab 5, we’re going to shift gears and we’re going to work in the Cloud for this lab. So you’re going to create a couple of Cloud resources. In most cases, these will be droplets on DigitalOcean. You can use other Cloud providers if you would like. I have had a couple of students do these labs on AWS. I haven’t had anybody try to do them on Azure yet. I really recommend DigitalOcean. It’s the system I’m familiar with and so for debugging and things, it’s the one that I’d be most able to help you with. So you create a couple of Cloud resources, you’re configure SSH in your firewall, set up some virtual hosts in Apache, and then we’re also going to start working with Docker. And so we’re going to set up a couple of Docker containers with reverse proxy so that you can see what that looks like as well. It’s really, really fun. So as always, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord. We’ve got the ed discussion board that you can chat with. You can schedule one -on -one office hours. We’ve got our usual office hour on Thursday. I’m working on trying to schedule a couple more guest speakers. It’s just got to try and work in their schedule, but I’m going to try and get Seth Galitzer if I can. I’ll try and get somebody from K -State Central IT if I can, and I’m going to try and get somebody from industry. So I’ll be reaching out and making some of those connections and trying to schedule those over the next few weeks.
Quick punch in here because I forgot to record this slide earlier. I have a couple of days of upcoming travel coming up this week. I will be out of the office most of Thursday through Sunday this week and also Thursday through Sunday of next week. Because of that, my response is maybe a little bit delayed and if you need any grading done by me, it may be a little delayed as well. Match should be available, so you’re more than welcome to schedule with him during those times. times. If you need any help, please don’t email me directly. Make sure you email the CIS 527 Help email address or post on ed discussion. That message goes to both myself and to Matt. So Matt will be able to jump in and help you out with things. But just making you aware that I’ve got some upcoming travel, which means I’ll be gone Thursday through Sunday the next couple weeks. So if you email me or try and contact me on either Thursday or Friday of those weeks, it might be Monday or Tuesday of the following week before I came back to you. So just bear that in mind. I’ve got a couple of days where I’m going to be gone. So hopefully that doesn’t cause any concerns. And if you need anything during those times, Matt should be able to help you out as well.
So it’s week eight. We’re finally at the halfway mark of the semester. Hopefully things are going well and you’re rolling into lab four with a lot of confidence. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know or talk to Matt. He’s also really more than capable of helping you out. So best of luck on lab four. Lab four is probably one of the more difficult labs in this class. So I hope it goes well. But as always if you have any questions let us know and I will see you again in a couple weeks