May 19, 2020

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Video Script

Hello and welcome to week one of CIS 527. This video is basically a weekly announcements video. I probably won’t do one each week, but it’s a good chance for me to describe a few things going on in the course and things that you may want to know as you get started. So first off, hopefully you’ve seen the introductory videos, but if not, my name is Russ Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester. This slide has my contact information. Feel free to take a look at it and let me know. You can email me anytime although for things related to the class, I prefer that you contact me through through Piazza. That allows both myself and my GTA, BreAnn, to respond to those questions very quickly.

Also, you may have already met BreAnn. She is my graduate teaching assistant for this semester. Her email is shown here. Again, feel free to contact us via email, but for things class related, we really do prefer that you contact us via Piazza so that we both see the message very quickly.

So, this class has been taught for several semesters at this point, especially during the summer, but summer 2020, I’ve made a few changes. One of the biggest changes is I’m now going to be enforcing a deadline of one module due each week. This is probably a little controversial, but in years past, I would leave the class open to the point where you could do anything at any time. And what we really found is that students would wait until the last minute to try and complete everything in this course. And it wasn’t really good for students. And it wasn’t really good for me either. And so this semester, I’m going to enforce a deadline where every module is due on a particular deadline. If you submit it after the deadline, there will be a scaling late policy where you lose 10% per day that it is late.

That said, if you know you have conflicts during the semester, if you’re going to be unavailable for any reason, contact me at the beginning of the semester and let me know. Generally what I would say is you should plan on working ahead of when you’re going to be unavailable instead of making up stuff after that deadline. Basically, I’m able to work with you on deadlines, but I really want us to stand the pace of getting one module due each week.

The other big change that I’ve made is the final project now includes a prototype portion. Originally, the final project just required you to design and analyze something. I’ve decided this semester that I’d also like you to prototype part of your design, that doesn’t mean that you have to build the whole thing or that you have to make it completely ready for the real world. But I’d like you to show some modicum of ability to design and develop the thing that you’re proposing. So this might be a little interesting. We’ll kind of see how that goes. But make sure you review the final project information closely. Especially if you’re familiar with how this class has been taught in the past because it is a little different this semester.

Finally, the other thing I’m doing diiferent this summer is I’ve decided to add some interactive discussions to this class that will be worth 10% of your grade. We’ll talk a little bit more about those as we get started. But basically, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have some regular zoom scheduled times during weeks two through six of the class, where we will get together on zoom, and we will talk about a particular topic probably for an hour. So if you can make the live session, that would be fantastic. We’d love to have really good discussions, but if not, we will record that session. You can watch it afterward. And then you can use that video to actually post your response to the discussion on canvas. We’ll probably actually use Piazza for that. But what I really want to do is give you a chance to communicate with me and your peers and some other folks about different things going on in System Administration. We’re going to try and bring in some guest speakers. For example, I may reach out to Seth Galitzer, our Computer Science Sys Admin, just to get you used to talking to people that work in that field and maybe getting some information about what’s going on. So that’s something a little bit new. We’ll see how that works. That will hopefully couple really well with the other thing we’ll do, which is we’ll continue to do our tea time office hours every week. So you’ll see messages about that. But it’s basically an open tea time where I sit in zoom. A lot of the Sys Admins and faculty and staff join me and you as students are welcome to come in and hang out with us, chat about just about anything, what’s going on in the world, whatever. So we’d love to see you there. I have a slide for that. Whoops. I already talked about this, but feel free to check it out.

Beyond that, keep in touch, there’s lot of places that you can get in touch with me- discussions on Piazza, Tea Time, office hours. You can also schedule one-on-one office hours with me anytime. There’s a calendly ilnk that you can find. So feel free to take advantage of that if you need more one-on-one time with me. You can also contact BreAnn. She can schedule some time to meet with you one-on-one. And lastly, I’ll be available on the Computer Science Rocket.Chat, which is available at chat.cs ksu.edu. So feel free to check that out as well. Other than that, that’s all I’ve got for week one. Good luck this semester. Feel free to keep in touch if you have any questions and I’ll probably post a couple more of these announcements videos as we go forward. So good luck have a good day!

June 29, 2020

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements video. I’m really glad to be here once again, I am back in Kansas so I can finally do these videos from my home studio. First off some quick things hopefully by now you’re done with lab three, if not, you should be getting done with that pretty quickly. So if you haven’t yet scheduled a grading time with BreAnn or myself and we can get lab three taken care of. Also make sure you check out on Piazza we had some issues with SNMP and lab three. So if you’re struggling on the SNMP, part of lab three, there is some information on Piazza that will help you out with that. Also, don’t forget the week two discussion response, the first discussion that we had with Seth Galitzer, that is due today by midnight. All you have to do is answer the few questions I posted on Canvas and then upload your response to Canvas by midnight tonight. Then starting today at 4pm is the week three discussion where we have Adam and Kyle the two Beocat sysadmins coming to talk about how they work with a high performance computing infrastructure, such as Beocat, they always give really interesting talks, so I’m hoping everybody can make it. And then also, don’t forget, you should be starting on lab four. Generally lab four is regarded as one of the harder labs in this class, and it will be due next Monday.

So, some tips for lab four, you’re going to need either four or five virtual machines. Usually you need a Windows Server, a Windows 10 client an Ubuntu server that you can reuse from your lab three, and then you’ll also need at least one Ubuntu client. You can either do it with two different snapshots or what I’ve started doing is actually just making a second Ubuntu client for the Windows Active Directory on Ubuntu part it’s up to you and how much space and resources you have available. This is by far the most taxing lab in terms of size. Lab six, we will use four of these VMs again in lab six, so you will need to keep them around. Basically, in this lab, you end up doing three things, you set up a Windows Active Directory server, and then connecting a Windows 10 client to that, then you set up an Ubuntu LDAP server and connect an Ubuntu client to that. With Ubuntu 20, we added the need for TLS certificates. So you’ll learn how to make that connection much more secure. Thankfully, you can just follow the guide for that. And then we will add an Ubuntu client to the Windows Active Directory. And this process has actually gotten super simple. A lot of people are really happy with the new process on Ubuntu 20. So the Ubuntu LDAP got a little harder, the Windows AD got a little bit easier. So it all works out.

So one thing I really wanted to talk about is getting help. We had several students with lab three that contacted us for grading, and then told us they ran into issues with the lab and weren’t able to get it to complete. But nobody asked us any questions. And so I really want to stress to you, please, please feel free to get help anytime you get stuck. There’s absolutely no expectation from either BreAnn or myself that you will be able to complete this class without asking questions. That’s part of the point. However, I don’t give you all the answers in the lab instructions, because if I did that, then the class would be kind of pointless. So there’s this weird gray area where I expect you to figure some things out on your own. But I also expect you to run into issues and have questions. So don’t be afraid to ask us for help. This is literally what BreAnn and I are paid to do. It’s especially what BreAnn is paid to do. But it’s also what I’m here to do. So to get help Piazza is key post on Piazza early, post on Piazza often, ask us all those questions. Read the other posts that your fellow students have posted and respond with your own information if you have any input. I added a new extra credit assignment to the class, helping hands, so that if you are active on Piazza and you are answering questions from other students, you can get extra credit points for that. Also on Piazza so we do ask that if you don’t if you feel comfortable, we would prefer that you ask your post. We would prefer that you ask your question publicly, that way other students can see the troubles that you’re having and can help you out. I understand that sometimes that can be a little bit uncomfortable if you have… if you feel like you have a stupid question or something. And that’s okay. Imposter syndrome was totally a thing. But also, I’m an introvert. I hate asking questions. And so you’re also welcome to ask your question anonymously. And so your fellow students won’t see who you are,. Obviously, if you post some identifying details in your post that’s on you, but you can ask your question anonymously. Only BreAnn and I will know who you are. Or you can ask it privately, in which case BreAnn and I are the only ones that can see the post. Sometimes we have been known to take that private post and make a short tl;dr version of it and post that as an anonymous post so that we can at least get that answer out there for people. If you’re truly stuck and you can’t get help on Piazza, you can always schedule a one on one time with BreAnn or myself to get help. We generally prefer that if you can ask the question first on Piazza and then we will direct you to a one on one. But if you want to schedule a one on one, you’re more than welcome to do that; both BreAnn and I have Calendly links available that you can use anytime you’d like. And like I said, once again, emphasis on there is no expectation that you will be able to complete this class without getting help. That is totally fine. It is what we’re here to do. So feel free to ask us questions anytime you have to.

So a quick summary of some of the changes we made in this class over the past few weeks. Most of these have already been announcements in Piazza or in Canvas. But just to clarify: the late policy, we have updated the late policy so that it only counts on working days only. And a working day is anytime where we would normally be in class. So for example, this Friday, the Fourth of July holiday does not count. We do need to work a little bit with Canvas to make sure that that’s getting applied properly, but we will look into that. So if the lab is due on Friday and you turn it in sometime before Monday at 7pm you’ll only be one day late. So we will make sure that that gets applied. If you have have a question on grading or you feel like the late policy was applied in the wrong way on any of your assignments, please let us know, and we will look into that. The new Canvas gradebook with this late policy is new to us. And so we’re still figuring out some of the quirks and tricks to make it actually work. The second thing we discovered is, if you have a late policy that is applied such that you end up getting a zero on a lab, even if you submitted it, it wasn’t unlocking the next module in Canvas. We have fixed that by assigning a minimum grade of 2%, which means that each lab assignment the minimum grade, if you submit it, is one point, so at least you will get that point so that you can move on to the next lab. One thing that I didn’t have in my slides here, but I want to mention really quickly, if you are done with a lab assignment and you’d like to move on to the next lab assignment, you can always go to the source website for this class, which is cis527.russfeld.me. And that has all of the textbook content for this course including all of the lab assignments. The only thing that isn’t there is some of the Canvas specific stuff like the quizzes and the discussions. And so for example, if you’re done with lab three and you’re waiting to get graded, you can go ahead and start watching the videos for lab four on that website. Again, it’s cis527.russfeld.me. We talked about this already, we added an extra credit assignment for the helping hands. Also just to clarify the extra credit in the class. Usually when you do something, we record a point or two points. And then at the end of the semester, we will scale those appropriately sized; there is a cap of 5% in extra credit in this class, so feel free to keep active and then at the end of the semester, we will scale it to make it basically match the amount of extra credit work that you have done up to 5% of the final grade in this class. Also, finally, K-State has implemented a mandatory mask policy on campus. This should not affect us but because we are 100% online class but that statement has been added to the syllabus and just be aware If you are on campus for any reason, you are required to wear a mask, at least as long as this order is in effect. I really encourage you to do that; it’s important for you to stay safe and stay healthy. So please keep that in mind.

All right. Quick overview of the discussions - we had our first discussion last Monday was Seth Galitzer at 4pm on Zoom, I thought it was really fantastic. It was great to hear a lot of the stuff that Seth does and some of the background. So don’t forget live discussions are every Monday at 4pm via Zoom, you can find the Zoom link on the Canvas homepage. Attendance is highly recommended but not required. We would really like to see you there. I think it’s a great chance to interact with other students in the class with industry folks and get some questions answered from me and from BreAnn. If you’re not able to attend, the video will be posted on Canvas usually shortly after the session is done. So you can watch that video and then respond to the discussion prompt on Canvas. Usually I ask a few questions about something the participants shared with us or some of the discussion or some of the things that they told us about. So you should be able to answer those questions pretty easily by watching that video. This week, like I said, we have Adam and Kyle, who are the two Beocat system administrators. They’re going to talk all about how they work to set up a high performance computing infrastructure, how they monitor it, how they maintain it. It’s usually really cool. So I’m looking forward to that. So we’ll see you today at four o’clock for that. Next week. We’re inviting a few students from the K-State Cyber Defense Club to discuss their infrastructure for basically simulating all sorts of different scenarios. They use it for training for their cyber defense competitions. So it’s something really cool that you might not be aware of that we have at K-State. So we’re going to have Caleb Fleming and probably a couple others from the cybersecurity club. Come talk about that. I have also tentatively scheduled K-State’s CIO to come in one of the last two weeks of the class. I’m still working on scheduling with him, but I am super duper excited that I was able to get him, at least tentatively confirmed to come talk to this class. It’s always one of the great speakers to try and get in is K-State’s CIO so that you can get kind of a top down view of what’s going on at K-State. If you don’t know our current CIO actually started about a week before the Hale Library fire and so he quite literally had a trial by fire his first couple weeks here. So hopefully he can tell us some stories about that.

So a quick overview of the schedule. Don’t forget the week two discussion is today at 4pm. The week one discussion response, if you weren’t able to attend and participate in person, is due tonight by midnight. This Thursday, BreAnn is unavailable, she’s got some other things going on. So if you try and schedule a meeting with her, her calendar will be completely blocked out on Thursday. I should still be available on Thursday so you can schedule with me. Friday, July 3rd is a student holiday because the Fourth of July is on a Saturday, so Friday, neither BreAnn or I will be effectively available. I will probably still be watching Piazza every once in a while over those couple of days, but I don’t make any guarantees that I will be quick. The week three discussion is next Monday at 4pm. Again, that’s the cybersecurity students. Lab four is due Monday by 7pm. So make sure you take that into account that both BreAnn and I will be unavailable from about 4pm till 5:30pm on Monday, so make sure you get your time scheduled. But the end of that discussion time might be a really good chance to talk to your fellow students and talk to BreAnn and I if you have any last minute questions on lab four. And then finally, the week two discussion response if you’re not able to attend today is due Monday, July 6 at midnight. So lots of things coming up.

Finally, a quick reminder, don’t forget this class does include a final project. Your final project is to do something system administration or it related. You can change something you can build something you can design a support infrastructure for something, you can do things like automation and DevOps. You can look at the infrastructure. You can look at different services that are available. There’s a full video online talking about different project ideas and the specifics of this project. You can work in teams on this final project. And in just a bit, probably before this video goes live, I will post a looking for group post on Piazza so you can collaborate with your teammates there and try and figure out if there’s somebody in the class that shares an interest with you and would like to work together. Don’t forget your proposal is due Friday, July 24. That is one week before the end of the semester. I encourage you to do it much before then. But that is the official last date that you can submit a proposal for full credit. And then the project itself is due then Friday, July 31. For the project, you will schedule a one on one time with me for a presentation, usually about 45 minutes between your presentation time and all the quick Q&A at the end. And so keep that in mind that last week of the class after lab seven is due we’ll spend most of that week doing final project presentations. Again, schedule your time early, so you can reserve the time you want. That way you don’t end up with this situation where you’re looking for a time, the day it’s due, and there’s no time left because they’re already booked. So keep the final project in mind. If you’re not sure what you want to do, and you want to talk with me about some possible project ideas, I’d be happy to do that I’ve got a few ideas that I can kind of pitch around and see if there’s something you’re interested in.

So finally, don’t forget to keep in touch, I am here to help, BreAnn is here to help. I really wish we could teach this class in person. The discussions that we used to have in the lecture of this class were some of the most fun I had teaching at K-State. But we can still do that - we have our Piazza discussion board, we have our Zoom weekly discussions. I’m on Tea Time office hours every Tuesday and Friday, although we won’t be on this Friday because of the holiday. BreAnn and I both host one on one office hours that you’re welcome to join. I’m also on the K-State Rocket.chat server. You can find me on K-State’s Microsoft Teams. Go to my website. I’m easy to find about anywhere. Please feel free to keep in touch, ask us questions, we’d love to hear from you.

And that’s it. So, good luck with the rest of the semester. Good luck on lab four. Like I said, lab four can be a little tricky. You need to make sure you follow the instructions really closely. The same advice applies for all the other labs, make snapshots often and don’t be afraid to roll back to a snapshot and try again, if something doesn’t work. There are lots of things that you can do that makes this go a lot simpler. So I wish you the best of luck. I will look forward to seeing most of you today at 4pm for a live discussion. And as always, if you have any questions, please post on Piazza

July 7, 2020

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Video Script

Good morning and welcome to the week five announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted once again from my dining room just to cover a little bit about what’s going on this week in CIS 527. So first off, lab four, the due date was moved back one day, hopefully everybody saw that announcement last week. So it is now due tomorrow, which is Tuesday by 7pm. So hopefully either today or tomorrow, you’re ready to schedule a grading time with either BreAnn or myself. The week three response is still due today by 11:59pm. So make sure you get that in. Our week for discussion is also today at 4pm. We’re going to have some students from the Cyber Defense Club at K-State talking about their infrastructure that they use for training and getting ready for their cyber defense competitions. And then also be aware that lab five and lab six, we have grouped them together and both of them are due one week from Friday. That should be Friday. I believe it’s the 17th of July.

So, coming up next, we’ve got lab four that’s due tomorrow. We talked about this last week, there are four or five VMs. The one thing that we have updated, there was some confusion about NETBIOS domain names. So check the Piazza post on that; there’s a pretty lengthy post Piazza post going into some of those discussions. I’ve worked with a couple of students that have had some issues on lab four, but we seem to be able to resolve them pretty quickly. So hopefully, things are going well on lab four. But if you’re having trouble, please talk to us and let us know if you have any questions.

For lab five, you’re going to be creating actual cloud resources using DigitalOcean. So you’ll do things like configure SSH, set up a domain name, set up TLS certificates, virtual hosts, load balancers, everything that you need to run a real live website out on the web.

Because of that, we’re going to be using some cloud resources that you may or may not have used before. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for the GitHub developer pack at the URL at the top of this slide. It’s a really great way to get lots of discounts online. Overall, in this lab, we’re going to use DigitalOcean. So we’ll need two DigitalOcean droplets that run about $5 a month. We’ll also use a load balancer just for lab five, the load balancer itself runs $10 a month, but you’ll use it for a day. So your your total cost should be less than $1. We’ll also use a domain from NameCheap which you can go to nc.me and get a free domain for the first year if you’re a student. For DigitalOcean. If you don’t already have a DigitalOcean account either through the education.github.com you can get a DigitalOcean account or if you go directly to DigitalOcean, right now they’re having a deal where you can get $100 free credit if you sign up a new account there. So basically either way you should be able to get this done for free. But if you have used DigitalOcean before and you have used your NameCheap free domain before, at most, your total cost should be about $15 or less to yourself.

That said if you are uncomfortable using cloud resources, or don’t have the ability to do this, please let me know so that we can make alternative arrangements. In years past, I’ve worked with students to do these either directly on their VMs, or use some of the cloud resources that I use, just so that your cost and your trouble is a little bit easier. But if you can, I highly recommend going ahead and doing this lab as it’s written, it’s a really great way to experience working with cloud resources and real domains and real TLS certificates. And so I really recommend doing it the way that I’ve got it configured.

After lab five, then you’ll start working on lab six. Lab six mostly deals with file servers and application servers and some of the things around those. Specifically for the cloud, you’ll set up both a front end and a back end system. So you’ll have your front end with your web interface your back end with your database. And with the file servers, we’ll actually learn how to automatically map those resources to our different virtual machines.

Lastly, if you have any questions, don’t forget, please keep in touch in this class; you can join the discussion on Piazza; you can join our weekly zoom discussions. We have tea time office hours twice a week, you can find that also on Piazza. I do one on one office hours, BreAnn does one on one office hours. And I’m also available on the CS Rocket.chat server, which is chat.cs ksu.edu. Basically, if you have any questions, concerns, comments in this class, the number one thing you can do is reach out and ask for help.

I always get really sad when I see students that fall behind in this class and I reach out to them. And they just… they haven’t come to me and asked for help. And so I always want to remind you that it isn’t online class. As much as I really want to be able to help you, it really depends on you as a student to reach out to me and let me know what I can help with. Otherwise, I just don’t know where my resources are best spent. So if you have questions or concerns, reach out to me anytime, let me know and I’d be happy to work with you to get those things resolved.

Other than that, good luck on lab four. Hopefully you’re getting it finished up today. Good luck on labs five and six, which are due in two weeks. If you have any questions on either of those, let me know and hopefully I will see a lot of you today at four o’clock. So have a good day.

July 13, 2020

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Video Script

Happy Monday morning I’m coming to you once again live and unscripted for our week six announcements video in CIS 527. I apologize for my Coronavirus hair. I haven’t gotten a haircut since March. So it’s definitely been interesting doing some of these videos and watching me change over the semester. I hope everybody’s doing well with the pandemic. I know it’s really tough right now. I’m living in Kansas City, and it’s really crazy right here. So I hope everybody’s staying safe and staying healthy.

Okay, so where we’re at - lab four was due last Friday. I think last time I checked about half the class had that turned in. So if you don’t have lab four graded, go ahead and schedule a time with either BreAnn or myself very soon so we can get that taken care of. Don’t forget the discussion response from the week four discussion with the CDC infrastructure folks is due today. So make sure you get that uploaded by 11:59 tonight. This week’s discussion actually had to be moved to tomorrow because of a scheduling conflict with our guest. So today at 4pm, I’ll be doing a quick live office hours from four to five. You can use the same link that we use for the discussion room to join those office hours. Feel free to come in, hang out as questions, discuss stuff, share ideas. I’m just going to be there hanging out and hopefully having a good time. So please feel free to join me today at 4pm.

So our week five discussion is actually tomorrow at 4pm. I hope folks can join. We actually have an industry person coming and joining us, Ethan from Cerner. He works in their, I believe it’s called Cerner Works. It may have changed his name recently. But they do a lot of system administration stuff for Cerner, which is a large company. And then we also have lab five and lab six, which are both due this Friday.

So some lab five tips. Basically, you’re going to be building virtual machines in the cloud. So if you haven’t yet, you’ll need to sign up for a DigitalOcean account. When you sign up for a new account, you should get $100 in free credit. If not talk to one of us. We have referral links that we can get you One of the trickiest things about lab five is setting up your SSH keys. The thing to keep in mind is you create the SSH key on the source that you’re logging in from, and then you copy that key to the destination. On Windows, I really don’t recommend using PuTTY anymore. You can get SSH installed via the Windows subsystem for Linux or in PowerShell. Or you can use any of your Ubuntu VMs from earlier labs. But I really recommend avoiding PuTTY at this point, it just… it isn’t as good as it should be. On your host, you’ll also need to configure your firewall and then you’ll set up some virtual hosts and certificates using Apache and certbot. Generally, lab five doesn’t take too long. It’s just a lot of reading and getting through the material the first time but the actual lab content shouldn’t take all that long to get completed.

Then on lab six, you’re going to do three big things. In your droplets on DigitalOcean you’ll create a front end and back end server using WordPress usually, I highly recommend installing WordPress from the zip file. There are tons and tons of ways you Install WordPress. But by far the easiest is downloading the zip file, extracting it on your frontend, configuring the database section of it to point to your back end, and then you should be good to go. You’ll also set up a file server in Windows and some group policy in Windows to automatically map those file shares on your Windows clients. And then you’ll also set up a file server in Samba - generally just editing the Samba config file is enough. And then you’ll add a couple of automounts on your Ubuntu clients so that it mounts those Samba files automatically for you.

Also, please keep in mind the final project - your proposal for the final project is due a week from Friday on the 24th. So you need to start thinking about that soon. Remember, the idea for the final project is to build something or fix something that is vaguely IT related. It doesn’t have to be completely IT. Some things you could think of, for example, you could build out a web resource for a new startup company. The Animoto case study that we look at in lab five is a really great way to think about that. You could think about setting up laptops for a school. What if K-State orders 100 new laptops? How would you use tools like Ansible or Puppet to automatically provision and set up those laptops. If you work for a small company, you could look at how you would design central authentication for that company. So all the computers use either Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP. And the resource sharing you can get with that, maybe even looking at VPN software, so you could connect to that network from remotely. More related to K-State. Think about the computer labs we have in 1114 and 1116. We have an example of a thin client lab that uses remote desktop to connect to big beefy Remote Desktop servers, or thick client labs like 1116, where each lab computer is its own fully powerful desktop. And so you could look at some of the cost benefit analysis of that. I’m sure Seth would be more than willing to talk to you about that as well. And so finally, on the final project, if you don’t have any good ideas, feel free to talk to either BreAnn or I - we’ve got some ideas we can share. We can kind of chew on things back and forth and see what’s interesting to you and how we can fit that into something that makes a final project. So the best thing I can say is don’t make this harder than it is we want to find something that is interesting and exciting to you and something that you would be excited to work on and try and build into a final project.

Other than that, here’s my usual slide. Don’t be afraid to keep in touch. There’s great discussions happening on Piazza. We have discussions on Zoom. We have our tea time office hours every Tuesday at 330 on Friday at 1030. We’d love to see you there. BreAnn and I both hold one on one office hours via zoom, all you have to do is schedule on our Calendly links. And then I also live on the Rocket.chat server. We may also set up a team’s server just to try that out for the last couple weeks of the semester.

But other than that, we’re getting close to the end of the semester, we only have three weeks left. So now’s the time to start making sure you’re getting everything taken care of as we get toward the end of the semester. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck and we will keep in touch.

July 20, 2020

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Good morning everyone and welcome to our week seven announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted here from kind of a rainy Kansas City this morning. So let’s get right to it. First off, here’s where we’re at. Last Friday, lab five and six were due. So if you haven’t turned in and gotten graded for lab five and lab six, you should be doing so really quickly. Last I checked, I think we had maybe half the class done with lab five and a few people were through lab six. So hopefully we get that caught up very soon. Also, don’t forget the discussion response for week five, Ethan at Cerner, is due tomorrow. I apologize. I forgot to get the questions uploaded last week, but I uploaded them this morning. So that is available for you. So don’t forget to finish that discussion response by tomorrow. Today we have a special guest for our discussion. We have Dr. Gary Pratt. He is K-State’s CIO who’s going to be joining us and hopefully he’ll tell us a lot about K-State IT, the infrastructure we have at K-State, the future of IT at K-State, and kind of his top down perspective on how things are going. So I’m hoping that’s going to be a really good discussion. I hope you can join us. Lab seven. The last lab in this class is due this Friday, and we’ll discuss lab seven here in a bit. Also, don’t forget your proposals for the final project are due this Friday. So be thinking about your final projects if you haven’t done that. And lastly, a quick reminder, please make sure you check Calendly for our availability, both BreAnn and myself. BreAnn is starting a job next Monday and so her availability goes way down after this week. And actually toward the end of this week, it may be a little short. So please take a look at the calendly links for both BreAnn and I make sure you’re aware of our availability. And most most of the time I will be available, BreAnn will be available for parts of this week, but then starting next week will be much less available. So just be aware of that.

So coming up next is lab seven. Some quick tips for lab seven. Each part of that lab is self contained. So you can jump back and forth between the parts and they really shouldn’t impact anything that you’re doing. The task one, the windows backups task does take time. Depending on the specs of your machine, it can take a couple hours to do a Windows backup. So make sure you’re aware of that. Also, there’s some good information in that lab for either adding a second hard disk to your VMs for task one, or you can add flash drive or something to your machine and use that for your backups. Either one of those work. Task four is building an ELK stack, that’s something I added new this year. To do that, you’re going to have to give one of your Ubuntu VMs four gigabytes of RAM in order to handle the ELK stack. If that doesn’t work, let us know. It’s something I’m trying this year. So if students have a lot of trouble with that task, we may change it. For task five, the webhooks part, make sure you read the hook examples link that’s below that.

And finally for lab seven, we’ve modified it a bit so we can do on offline grading. So to get graded for lab seven, you can still contact either BreAnn or I through Calendly and we’ll grade stuff live for you in person. However, if you’d like to get graded offline, here are the things you need to submit for each task. For task one, we need four or five screenshots that are described in the assignment. For task two, you’ll submit a zip file of your backup and a readme that describes how your backup is built. For task three, you’ll send us the URL of either your Munin or your Ganglia instance. And bear in mind, those instances should so show data from both frontend and backend. For task four, we just want you to install the ELK stack and get us a screenshot of Metricbeat showing data from your VMs. And then finally, for task five, you’ll need to add us to your GitLab repo on the K-State CS GitLab server, and then send us the URL for where that repo is on your frontend or backend, probably front end, so that we can see the changes that we make to that repo.

So some quick notes about the final project. You’ve seen this slide a couple of times, already. So basically the idea of a final project is to build something or fix something IT related. There’s a few different ideas here, setting up web resources for a startup, building laptops for school, central authentication, thin clients vs. thick clients. There’s tons of ideas, maybe even today during the live discussion, you might get some ideas from Gary Pratt. So please be thinking about ideas. If you’re not sure you can schedule a Calendly time to chat with either BreAnn and I, we have some really good ideas just kind of stored up that students have mentioned over the years that we can share with you as possible good ideas for a final project. But bear in mind your proposal is due Friday. The proposal is super short. It’s usually half a page or less, its just enough description so that we can understand what your project is so that we can approve it so you can work on it next week.

So the final project presentation is coming up. You should schedule that for sometime next week, the last week of class, I highly recommend reserving your time now. There are 20 people in this class. Which means that if each person needs a half hour, that’s going to take 10 hours out of my time, which means that immediately not everybody is going to fit on Friday. It will be some Thursday some Friday. So schedule your time now - go to my calendar for Thursday or Friday of next week and grab your time. You should schedule 30 minutes per team member so if you’re on a team have to you’ll schedule an hour. If you need alternative arrangements, if you work during the days and you need to present in the evenings or something, contact me as soon as possible so we can make alternative arrangements. I’m trying the best I can to keep my calendar somewhat free for those two days. But there are always things that come up at the last minute so if you can schedule your times now I know that I can work around those.

A couple other quick administrivia things - tevals will be sent out next week. You should get an email from the teval system next Monday encouraging you to fill that out. Please take the time to fill out the teval and respond honestly with your thoughts and your feedback on this class. As you hopefully are aware all comments and feedback are welcome. I do change this class from time to time. And BreAnn and I have been having really good discussions about the implementation of deadlines in this class and some of the changes we want to make going forward into next summer that I think are going to make this class even better, but we really welcome your comments and feedback. You can comment on the teval, which is anonymous. You’re also welcome to contact me directly. If you want to chat with me and share some ideas that you have directly with me. I totally welcome that. And lastly, keep an eye on your grades.

For final grades, you should check Canvas anytime right now and look at the gradebook. As far as I know the grades you see in Canvas are correct. If you have any questions or concerns about those let me know as soon as possible so I can address that. It’s much much easier to fix grading problems now than it is Friday or the Monday after the end of the semester when I’m trying to submit grades to KSIS. So please make sure you’re checking your grades and let me know if there are any discrepancies you see as soon as possible.

Other than that, the usual keep in touch slide. We have great discussions going on Piazza. We have good Zoom discussions; I meet with students, it seems like almost every day now, which is fantastic. Don’t forget, we have our tea time office hours, which are Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. It’s a great way to just get together and hang out with fellow computer science students and some of our faculty. We really do have a lot of fun during those times. I hope you join us. You can still schedule one on one office hours, I’m still on Rocket.chat. And we have our live discussion today at four o’clock with Gary Pratt. So tons of ways that you can get in touch with us in this class.

Other than that, we are almost there - we’re at the end of the semester. So we’re getting things wrapped up pretty quickly, hopefully get through labs five, six and seven very easily. If you do have questions or concerns, let me know. And then I look forward to seeing your final projects. The final projects in this class are always very interesting and I find it really exciting to see what students are thinking about. So good luck this week, and I will look forward to hearing from you soon.

July 27, 2020

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• Slides

Video Script

Good morning and welcome to the last weekly announcements video for CIS 527 for summer 2020. I’m really excited to see the end of the semester and I hope you are too. Here’s a few quick things to keep in mind for this week. First off lab seven was due last Friday. So if you haven’t completed and turned in lab seven, make sure you do that ASAP. If you look on Piazza, there’s information about how to turn in lab seven completely offline so you don’t have to get any live grading done. But if you’re having trouble with it, you can always schedule a live grading time especially if you want us to look at what you’re doing and see if we can give you at least partial credit for it. So please make sure you do that. If you’ve already turned in lab seven, BreAnn went through and graded almost all of it this weekend. So hopefully you should see some notes on Canvas very shortly. If you haven’t heard back from her yet, you should be very soon. If you have gotten an email from her especially about task five on GitLab, please make sure you respond to that ASAP so that we can get the permissions we need so we can test task five of lab seven on GitLab. Also, don’t forget the final project proposal was due Friday, I believe I got a final project proposal from most everybody in the class. So that’s really great. I posted comments and feedback on those so you can check that out on Canvas anytime. Also, don’t forget the week six discussion response for Gary Pratt K-State CIO is due today. So you can go out to Canvas and find the discussion prompt for that. And also, final project presentations are coming up this week. So if you haven’t scheduled your time for your final project presentation, please do so now. My Friday afternoon is already almost completely booked up. So make sure you’re looking at my calendar and planning ahead accordingly. Just because you get it done on Friday doesn’t mean you may have time to present it if you haven’t scheduled a time, so don’t forget to do that. I generally prefer presentations on Thursday and Friday of this week. But if you think you’ll get done sooner you can schedule earlier than that. So check our Calendly availability and see when we’re available. Also, please bear in mind that BreAnn doesn’t have any official availability right; now she started her full time job this week. But she will be doing some stuff in the weekends and generally following up with this class when she has time. So mostly if you need Calendly availability, it will be on my calendar for the rest of this week.

So for the final projects, you should be working on that this week, you’ll need to turn in three different parts of the final project to get a full grade for it. The first part is the written report. In the assignment, I give you a template that you should start with, that’s a good place to start, although you can adjust it a little bit to fit your needs. The big part of the written report is going to be showing me your research describing the system that you’re proposing and then detailing the SWOT analysis as you perform. Generally, I’ve seen the research take a couple pages, the proposal take a couple of pages, and then maybe each item of the SWOT analysis take at least a page, but there is no minimum or maximum limit. It’s however much content you think you need to get your point across. Your written report can include graphics and data as needed, feel free to make it as easy to read as you want. The second part is the live presentation, which will be about 15 to 30 minutes, per person. If you’re on a team of two, it will be twice that long. So schedule about a 30 minute block with me. And that’s when we’ll do your presentation. The big thing about your presentation is: I am your CIO for whatever organization this is situated in. And so you need to convince me that you have done your homework and that you’ve analyzed it well by going through your proposal and your SWOT analysis, and convince me that this is something our company should do. So that’s really the basis of your presentation. And then finally, you should build some small prototype that you can demo during the presentation. The prototype should be very small, the focus is on small here. So generally, I think you should spend about two to four hours building your prototype; anything more than that and it’s probably too much. For example, if your presentation revolves around AWS, your prototype might be building a system very quickly in AWS and installing a web browser on it, or a web server on it. That might be all you need as a small prototype to show that you’ve taken steps in the direction of your presentation just a little bit.

Some other things going on this week - Tevals, I believe everybody in this class should have gotten an email inviting them to complete a Teval this morning. Please take the time to fill out this Teval and send us your honest feedback about this course. Remember, the Tevals are completely anonymous to me, and I don’t even get to read them until after final grades are submitted. So you can say anything that you feel like you want to in there, and I really appreciate that feedback. It’s something that helps us constantly improve this course. And it helps me constantly improve and refine my teaching styles. So if you have any comments, for good or for bad, please put them in the Teval and make sure you get that submitted this week. Lastly, we’re getting toward the end of the semester. So make sure you’re checking Canvas and looking very closely at your grades. If you see anything in there that is incorrect, please email me and let me know ASAP. So I can get that taken care of. There is always a chance that something gets entered incorrectly in the gradebook. And it’s easier to solve that now, then after final grades have been submitted. So if you see any concerns in your gradebook, let me know as soon as possible.

Other than that, as always, feel free to keep in touch. We have great discussions going on Piazza, we have good Zoom discussions, we have our regular tea time office hours, which remember are every Tuesday at 330 and every Friday at 1030. So you’re more than welcome to join those even after this class ends. We’re going to keep tea time office hours going throughout the semesters, so feel free to join in. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me anytime, even outside of this class, it’s always on my website, it’s always on my email signature. And I will be on the K-State CS Rocket.chat for the foreseeable future. We’ll also probably be implementing Teams at some point. So basically, feel free to keep in touch with me any way that you’d like. I’d love to hear from students in this class. I would love to see where you end up. I like to see how students in this class go in industry and are able to use some of the skills that we cover in this class in industry, it’s really great for me to see that.

Other than that it’s final project season. So it’s time to sit down and do some writing. I was inspired here by Alexander Hamilton to post this gif on the last weekly announcements video. Hopefully working on the final project is enjoyable for you. Hopefully, you’re able to get it done soon this week. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and let me know. Otherwise, it’s been an honor having you in my class and I look forward to seeing all of you in the future. Have a good day.

June 2, 2021

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, these announcements videos are usually much more unscripted than the other videos I do for this course. But I think it’s kind of fun to do these videos just so I can chat with you a little bit and tell you about what’s going on in the course. So once again, I’m Russell Feldhausen. I’m your instructor for this course My contact information is here on this slide. I work remotely from Kansas City. And so I’m not usually on campus very often. But I’m almost always at my computer and I’m on discord and watching my email throughout the day. So I should be pretty easy to get ahold of probably email is the best way to get a hold of me. But if you have short questions and want to chat with me on discord, I’ll try and keep an eye on discord throughout the day, this summer.

So this course has changed a little bit over the years that we’ve taught it online. There’s a couple of things that were new last summer that we’re continuing this summer. The big thing is now we’ve added due dates. So there is actually one module due each week, it’s not nearly as self paced as it used to be. But students find that they like having those structures in place instead of allowing themselves to get super far behind in the course, because they’re just simply weren’t deadlines. To go with that we now have a late work penalty. So once a lab is due, it’s 10% off of the total number of points available in that lab per day that it’s late, I think it goes down to a minimum of 60. So anything below 60%, there won’t be a deduction. But to get the higher grades, you have to turn it in on time. The final project does have a small prototype portion to it that we added last semester. And I’m going to continue with that this year. The big thing with the prototype is it doesn’t have to be too big, you don’t actually have to build what you’re proposing in the final project, you just have to build a small prototype so that you’ve played around a little bit with the technology itself. So that it’s not purely in theory, like some of the previous projects were. There have also been some minor changes in each lab, I will warn you make sure that you read the labs very carefully. If you are familiar with this courses content, I change things from time to time, a lot of it is I will be looking out for those changes to be in your labs. Otherwise, I will start to suspect that you maybe got the labs from a previous students. So make sure you read the labs carefully and do what they say in this semester and not what you might have seen in previous semesters, because they are subtly different everywhere. The other thing that we added last summer is we added some interactive discussion times I really enjoyed that. So we’re going to do that again this summer. And I’ll talk a little bit about that here in just a second.

The lab grading in this course is a little bit unique. What you’ll do to get your labs graded is you’ll schedule a time to meet with me virtually using my calendly link, there’s a little 15 minute time slot for grading these cis 527 Labs, you can schedule your grading time before the lab is complete, but the time your scheduling should be after you intend to have your lab complete. So if you know there’s only certain days or times you’re available, you can go ahead and schedule that time ahead of time. The calendly link itself requires four hours notice. So if you try and schedule at eight o’clock in the morning for some time yet that morning, those times won’t be available on calendly. So make sure you think ahead and schedule your times as soon as possible. Each week, you can schedule out ahead of time, if you know you’re going to be done with the lab, when we meet the calendly will actually generate a zoom link for us will meet via zoom will use screen share. And I’ll have you walk through parts of your lab and show me how it’s working. Generally, if the lab is working, it takes about five minutes to grade. If things are not working, it takes a little bit longer, because we’ll look for some partial credit to see where you’re at. But a lot of this course is a completion course it either works or it doesn’t. And you’ll get points if it works. And you get some points, maybe no points if it doesn’t work. So it’s really on you to make sure that your labs are complete and working when you’re ready to have them graded. The other thing I will stay with grading. As soon as you start grading with me, you’re not allowed to make any changes to your labs. Even if halfway through the grading process, you realize you did something wrong. It’s already too late, you started grading. So that’s just to clarify that policy. I have had some students that have asked me if they could change things really quick that they realized were wrong. But it’s like changing the answers on a test after you hand it in to your teacher. So as soon as we start grading, you won’t be able to make any changes to your labs, and you’ll get the score that you’ll get. So keep that in mind and make sure your labs are really ready to go before we start grading them.

So for the discussions, I’ve got them pretty much scheduled. If you look on canvas, you’ll already see the schedule out there. I just need to put names on the times. We’ll have one discussion per week, I actually will schedule it all eight weeks of the semester. The weeks we don’t have a guest speaker we’ll just do those as open office hours. So you can drop in Say hi ask questions, whatever. But for weeks two through six, we will have a guest speaker come in. They’ll talk for about 45 minutes to an hour. This semester. The one thing I do require you to do is submit your questions on canvas beforehand, about two or three days in advance of the session. That way I will have a bank of questions that I And ask the person even if you aren’t able to show up. And then to actually get your points, there are two things you can do. You can either show up in person and ask at least one question, hopefully one of the ones you pre submitted, but if not, if you come up with a question you can ask it, that’s one way you can get those points. If you’re not able to attend in person, you can watch the video afterwards. And I’ll have a little prompt that I want you to respond to based on what you saw in the video. So you’ll watch the video, write your response, and you’ll get your points that way, I really encourage you to attend the live sessions, if at all possible, we’ve got some great speakers coming in. And it’s a great chance for you to interact with some of the people working directly in this field.

So beyond that, this summer, feel free to keep in touch. We have a Discord server for the computer science department that I’m pretty active on so you can always chat with me there. If you’re not on that server, you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu. It’ll have you signed in with your case date account and your discord account and it will link them together and invite you to the server. And then when you go back to discord, you should now see the server show up in your list. Email me if that doesn’t work, and I’d be happy to help you with that. We’ll have our zoom discussions once a week on Thursdays. I also host Tea Time office hours on Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. Those are just open drop in office hours we can come chat about anything. The link is always posted on discord when we start so join the discord server or email me if you’d like the tee time link and I’ll send it to you directly. And then of course you can always schedule time to meet with me one on one for Office Hours via calendly is the easiest way to schedule that. And I’m always more than willing to help you out where I can.

Other than that, good luck this semester. Hopefully you enjoy this course. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me anytime and I wish you the best of luck.

June 14, 2021

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week two announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, don’t forget today it’s Monday. So lab 1 is due by today at 7pm. However you do you need to schedule to have it graded and most of my grading times are before 5pm. So make sure if you haven’t done that yet, you need to schedule a time to grade ASAP on calendly so that I can meet with you via zoom and grade your lab. Remember, if you work during the day on eight to five normal hours, you can email me and make arrangements to have your lab graded after 5pm but only by email beforehand. So don’t email me tomorrow or the next day letting me know that you had to work today. That’s something you need to plan ahead to take care of. This Wednesday, there are a couple of things due Wednesday by 11:59 you should do your Discord intro so by then you’ll need to join the discord server and introduce yourself and as soon as you do that, I’ll respond. And I will put in the points for that. When you introduce yourself. Don’t be afraid to you’re actually encouraged to ask me a question. Don’t be afraid to ask me anything that you want to know. I’m really happy to answer any questions you have about myself, my background, this class, anything that you want. So that’s do this Wednesday. The other thing that’s due this Wednesday is you need to submit two questions for our guest speaker that’s coming in on Thursday. Seth Galitzer I’ll talk about him in just a second. But you need to submit two questions on canvas as part of that as well. And that’s due by Wednesday night 11:59. Then on Thursday, we have our speaker Seth Galitzer he’s coming in at 3:30 on Thursday via zoom. If you can be there live, that would be fantastic. We’d love to have a really good discussion with him so that he feels like it’s a good use of his time. But if you can’t make it because of any other conflicts, you can watch the video afterwards and write a little written prompt and you’ll be able to get your points that way. And then finally, don’t forget you should start on lab to lab two is due next week on Monday again at 7pm. The nice thing about lab two as I’ll talk about in a second. We don’t have to do live grading with that.

So don’t forget one of the things I’d like you to do is introduce yourself on Discord. discord is a great place for you to ask quick questions as you’re working on lab get some clarification. Usually if I’m sitting at my computer or even if I have my phone with me, I will try and respond to the discord questions as soon as I can. But I don’t guarantee any particular response time on Discord. so be warned. If you post something on discord and it’s not answered within a certain amount of time, feel free to email me emails guaranteed will get a response within one business day. You can also use discord to chat with other students. I’ll probably use it throughout the semester to post news and current events and things that we can discuss there. I’ll also post a lot of reminders there. I won’t spam you with emails from Canvas on little simple reminders about upcoming things. But I will do that on Discord. So if you want some reminders, joining discord is a great way to do that. And finally, don’t forget to join discord you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu Follow the instructions there it will invite your discord account to join the discord server that we have, and it will set everything up for you.

So our speaker this week is Seth Galitzer. Seth Galitzer is the computer science system administrator. And he’s been in that role since I believe 2006, which is when I was an undergraduate here at K state. He actually has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from K-State. And he’s worked for a couple of departments at K-State but computer science since about 2006. He currently is the person that manages all the computer science systems and labs in our department. So pretty much every computer science system you interact with is under Seth’s purview. He’s got a few students to work for him as well, his counterpart, Earl Harris, retired last year. So it’s now just Seth that’s in charge of a lot of this guy. And he comes with a wealth of knowledge from the world of system administration. He really is probably one of the most knowledgeable people you’ll get to talk to this semester. So please come with questions about how the computer science systems work, how it’s architected, how you maintain a set of systems to allow students to learn and play around with tools like Linux, and MySQL, and web servers, all on a very tight budget. So I hope you look forward to look talking to Seth here on Thursday.

So coming up this week is lab to lab two, you’re basically going to redo lab one, but this time, you’re going to set up your VMs using puppet instead of doing it manually. So for lab two, the short version is you’ll reinstall the operating system, usually on a new virtual machine, you can delete the VMs that you’ve used for lab one, as soon as they’re greater than you’re happy with your grade. But you basically reinstall the base operating system, install puppet. And then as soon as you get to that point in the setup, make a snapshot of your VM. And the reason I have you do that is the rest of the lab is going to be writing a puppet manifest to do things like setting up the user accounts and files and installing software and then you test that manifest by applying it and then if it works or doesn’t work, you can restore back to that state. snapshot before you’ve ever applied the manifest. to test it. Again, if you don’t make a snapshot, and you want to undo some of the changes your manifest does, you’re probably going to have to reinstall your operating system. And that’s a really, really tough thing to do when you’re in a hurry. So make sure you make that snapshot when it tells you to in lab two, so that you can roll back to it as you work on your manifests. The other big thing I can tell you about your manifests, try and keep it simple, do things such as puppet resource where you can actually query the setup of a system. So one thing I tell students to do is if you want to create a user account, manually make the user account and then use puppet resource to query what it looks like. And you can use that output in your puppet manifest by tweaking it a little bit. So use the tools at your disposal. And then also bear in mind that at least my model solutions are pretty short. In total, each file is about 200 lines of code or less. So two files, you’ll have less than 400 lines of code total. So try not to make this too complicated. I’ve had some students get really stuck in the weeds trying to make this super fancy, it really doesn’t have to be very fancy, it just needs to get the work done, and work really well and be very well tested.

Other than that, don’t be afraid to keep in touch in this class. We’ll have good discussions on Discord. We have our zoom discussion times with our guest speakers starting this Thursday at 3:30. So make sure you get that on your calendar and plan to attend. I also host Tea Time office hours every Tuesday at 3:30. We also have a time Friday at 10:30. However, for the next five weeks, I’ll be doing training sessions on Friday mornings. So I’m guessing tea time office hours will start late if they started all unless somebody else jumps on. So hopefully we’ll have some times on Friday. But definitely Tuesdays at 3:30 I will always be on. And then of course you can always schedule a one on one times with me via calendly. So jump on my calendar, grab a time if you want to meet with me in person that way. So this is usually the response I get when students start working on lab one, or lab two is they feel like oh, I have to redo lab one. And yes, that’s kind of the point I am having you redo lab one. But I’m trying to show you the power of using tools such as puppet to automatically configure your machines instead of manually configure them. And I guarantee on Thursday when Seth comes here, if you talk and ask him about how he uses chef to maintain all of the computers in our computer labs, you’ll very quickly find how useful tools such as that are. So I hope you find this lab interesting. This is really the last of the setup labs. And then we’ll go into lab three and lab four, where we’re working off a lot on core networking technologies and things such as active directories and LDAP for authentication. So good luck on lab two. I look forward to seeing you this week when we grade lab one. And as always, if you have questions, let me know.

June 21, 2021

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2021. So we’re on week three, which means that lab do… is lab two is due tonight at 7pm. So make sure you get that submitted, as we’ll talk about in a brief moment, the only things you have to submit on lab two are your two puppet manifest files. That’s all I need. Make sure on your manifest files if you installed any libraries that I need to install to test it, you put a little comment at the top of the file that’s also listed in in the assignment instructions. But a lot of students forget that step. Lab two is due tonight at 7pm. This Wednesday, we have the questions for week three. That should be the week three questions I forgot to change the slide. They’re due at midnight on Wednesday night. And then Thursday at 330. We have our guest speaker it’s Dr. Gary Pratt. I’ll talk about him in just a second. And then next week, you’ll be working on week, lab three, which will be due next Monday at 7pm.

So as I mentioned before, on lab two grading it’s Canvas only you don’t need to schedule a meeting with me. However, if you’d like to talk to me about lab two or have any questions on lab two, you’re welcome to schedule a meeting. But for those of you that have already scheduled a meeting, if you don’t need it for grading, you’re welcome to cancel that meeting or just email me and let me know that you don’t actually need to meet. All you really need to do to get lab to graded is submit your two puppet manifest files on Canvas. And then I will grade them on my VMs here.

So our speaker this week is Dr. Gary Pratt. He is the K-State Chief Information Officer and vice president for information technology. He’s been in that role since 2017. And if I’m remembering correctly, he started in that role about a month or so before the Hale library fire it was very soon after he started that we had the major Hale library fire, which may not seem like it impacts IT until you remember that the vast majority of the IT infrastructure was in the basement of Hale library. And hopefully he can share some information about what it was like dealing with that event and the recovery from that event. So he’s really interesting to talk to he oversees all of K-State IT and the IT infrastructure and organization. Gary Pratt is definitely much more on the big picture side of things doing long range planning and preparation for IT infrastructure changes. He loves to talk to students. He’s a teacher by nature. So I hope you get some really good information out of Dr. Gary Pratt, and I hope you have some really good questions to ask him.

So coming up this week, you’re going to start working on lab three, lab three is getting toward the more difficult parts of this class. It’s not the most difficult lab, but it’s toward the top of the list. In lab three, you’re going to set up and configure some core networking services. So you’ll set static IP addresses on some systems, you’re going to configure remote access using remote desktop and SSH, you’re going to install a DNS and DHCP server and get them configured. You’re also going to play a little bit around with SNMP and Wireshark, and a whole lot of really cool networking tools. This lab especially can be kind of tricky. If you’ve never done any networking before. There are a couple of documents toward the end of the modules in Canvas that are hints and diagrams and some troubleshooting information. So feel free to take a look at that that’s really useful information I’ve written up over the past couple years. And of course, the big thing is if you’re unsure, don’t be afraid to ask questions, you can email me, you can ping me on Discord, you can just ask a question of the class. You can also schedule one on one office hours with me using calendly. So make sure you keep that in mind. There’s lots of ways that you can get help on this lab. In general, I tell students, if you’re working on a problem for more than about an hour, and you haven’t made any progress, that’s a good sign that you need to take a step back and maybe ask for help instead of continuing to beat your head against that problem. So don’t be afraid to ask questions if you get stuck.

Other than that, like I always say keep in touch with me. There’s Discord. There’s zoom discussions on Thursdays after our guest speaker. We host Tea Time office hours, mostly Tuesdays at 330. During the summer, once we get past this teacher training session I’m working with and we’ll pick up again at Fridays as well. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me I’m always available. So hopefully as you work in this lab, you’ll feel like you’re getting some networking figured out. Hopefully, I think this is a really useful lab, especially as you go into any sort of networked environment. It’s one of the more useful labs I’ve heard from students, but it can be tricky. So good luck. Let me know if you have any questions and I will see you next week.

June 28, 2021

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Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements for cis 527 in summer 2021. I’m a bit informal this week because I decided not to set up all my recording equipment just to do my announcements this week, but I hope you can bear with me. So this week, we’ve got lab three, it’s due tonight by 7pm. This lab does require live grading. So if you haven’t scheduled a time to meet with me already, please do so as soon as you can. Remember that my Monday times fill up kind of quickly. And also the calendly requires you to schedule a few hours in advance. So if you wait till this afternoon, all of my times, Monday might be gone. And you’ll have to grade with me Tuesday with the day late penalty. So make sure you stay on top of that. This Wednesday. We also have the response from our week three discussion with Dr. Pratt and the questions for our week for discussion with the Beocat admins that are due Wednesday night at 1159. We have our speaker the two Beocat admins on Thursday at 330. And then next week, we’ll be working on lab four, which will be due the following Monday. Actually, I think it’s the following Tuesday. So check the dates on Canvas. I think I moved it to Tuesday because of the Fourth of July weekend.

So for lab three grading, be prepared to show me these things when we meet via zoom. You’ll need to be able to remotely connect from your boon to into your Windows system using RDP and then from your Windows system or the other Ubuntu system via SSH into your Ubuntu server. Your Ubuntu server should have a static IP on it. It should also have the DNS server setup. So we’ll take a look at your DNS server settings. We’ll also take a look at the lookups for DNS and make sure that that’s working. And we’ll check the SNMP and Wireshark. Mostly I’ll just be looking for the screenshots for that; you can either show me those via zoom, or you can upload those in a zip file on Canvas. Either way works for me for grading on lab three.

So one thing that I want to mention real quick, I haven’t gotten a whole lot of questions for lab three. And that actually is a little disturbing to me, because usually lab three is the one that is very tricky. So I wanted to quickly post a little bit about how to be successful in this course. Don’t forget, when you’re reading the assignments, make sure you read them very carefully. I’ve tried to give you lots of hints and ideas in those assignments. But I also leave some things purposely vague, so that you have to do a little thinking or do a little research on your own. Especially for lab three, there’s some posted hints and diagrams and debugging information, so make sure you read those. Make use of the resources that I link in my videos on the pages. But big thing is, don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re stuck on something, the one thing I don’t want you to do in this class is sit there and spin your wheels. If you’ve spent more than an hour or half an hour or so googling and really working hard on a problem, and you’re not making any progress. That’s the time to take a step back and ask me for help. Because there are situations you can get into where systems aren’t working the way they should, or you’ve made a bad assumption or something didn’t install correctly. And I can help you pinpoint whether that’s the case or not. And whether it’s something you can actually try and get past or if it’s something you need to start over. So big thing is don’t be afraid to ask me questions in this class, I’m more than willing to help answer them.

So our speaker this Thursday are the two Beocat system admins, Adam Tygart and Kyle Hutson, they’ve managed K-State supercomputer they’ve been doing so for several years now at this point, the big benefit that they have, among other things is they have experience working with very, very large, very powerful hardware, both homogenous systems and heterogeneous systems. They’re really good to talk about the discussion of on prem versus cloud, certain things you might want to do in the cloud, but maybe supercomputing and high performance computing, you still want to do on premises on your own hardware. They also have a lot of experience with scientific computing, and how you manage large systems that have hundreds of nodes, and 1000s of CPUs and all these different things running. And it’s also really interesting to talk to them about performance - how most servers, you want to have very low CPU usage on a supercomputer like Beocat, you want to have very high CPU usage. So they’re really a wealth of knowledge, I hope that you enjoy talking to them.

So coming up this week, we’ve got lab four. Lab four is all about working with Active Directory and open LDAP to create authentication systems. So you’ll install a Windows Server VM, you’ll configure Active Directory, open LDAP, you’ll configure clients to log in against each of those. And then we’re also going to configure a little bit of interoperability so that you’re able to log in from Ubuntu on an Active Directory system, much like we do at K-State in computer science. As with all of these labs, I really, really encourage you to make snapshots as you’re going, those snapshots are going to help you a lot specifically right before you configure Active Directory and right before you install and configure open LDAP I would say that my success rate on those is about 80% which means one in five times I try and do this I screw it up and I have to rollback my snapshot and try again. So make sure you make snapshots in lab four, before you start doing any of these major configuration things, same thing with the clients, make sure you have a clean snapshot, you can roll back to just in case something doesn’t work.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week. As always, please feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got good discussions going on Discord, you’re more than welcome to join and chat with me there. We’ll have our Zoom discussions on Thursday. That can also be an open office hours. If you have questions about the lab, I do Tea Time office hours right now, we’re still doing just Tuesdays at 330. However, in a couple weeks, once I get done with my teacher training program, we’ll start doing Fridays at 1030 as well. And then of course, you can always schedule one on one office hours with me anytime just use my calendly link just like you do for any grading.

So that’s all I got this week. I hope that this week as you’re going through working with Active Directory and open LDAP, you don’t feel like Stitch here and get really frustrated with it. It can be one of the more frustrating things to work with in system administration, just because sometimes it doesn’t work. And you don’t know why. And it’s almost easier to start over than to try and figure out why it doesn’t work in the first place. So if you have to roll back and try again, don’t be afraid to do that. Like I said about one in five times when I do it. I have to do that. So make sure you keep working on it. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck this week. Happy Fourth of July and I will see you next week.

July 6, 2021

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Hello, and welcome to the week five announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, you’ve got lab four, it’s actually due tomorrow, which is Wednesday by 7pm. So hopefully you’re getting things done with lab four. Also on Wednesday, you’ll have your question responses for last week’s discussion and the questions for this upcoming week’s discussion due that night by 11:59pm. Our speaker this week is Hunter Guthrie. I’ll talk a little bit more about him in just a second. And then we’re going to switch back to Mondays at 7pm. From here on out. So next week, lab five is due on Monday. So it’s kind of a quick turnaround. But I don’t think it will be a big problem as we talked about lab five.

So for lab four grading, there are a couple of things I’m really looking for on the Windows side, you should have Windows Server installed, you should have an Active Directory configured with a user and a group in it. And then your Windows client should be able to log in via Active Directory. On the Ubuntu side, you should have an open LDAP server installed with a user and a group created. And then your Ubuntu client should be able to log in against open LDAP. And then finally, you should have another Ubuntu client either another VM or a snapshot in the same VM that’s able to login via your windows Active Directory as well. So it sounds a lot simpler than it is. But it’s really just very few outcomes that we’re looking for in this particular lab.

So as before, to be successful in this class, make sure you’re reading all the assignments carefully. Make sure you’re looking at all the posted information, including the diagram for this lab, there’s a really nice networking diagram that you can check out. Feel free to use the resources that I made available, including all of the links on all of the pages, those are usually really helpful. If you find a broken link, let me know you can get some of those bug bounty extra credit points for that. And finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re sitting there spinning your wheels trying to work on the same problem for longer than about a half hour or so that’s a good opportunity for you to take a step back and ask me questions. However, that means you have to start in these labs a little bit earlier, because you won’t have a ton of time to ask me questions and get a response, especially on Tuesday or Wednesday, right before things are due.

So our speaker this week is Hunter Guthrie. Hunter Guthrie is officially his title is the plant system administrator. He works for Evergy. And specifically he works at the Wolf Creek generating plant, which if you’re unfamiliar with the area is the nuclear power plant that’s a little bit south of Topeka. And so he’s a former CIS 527 student he was in my class several years ago. And he now works in a very highly secure industry working as a system administrator for a nuclear power plant. And so he has some really interesting insights on system administration in that particular field. And hopefully, he does a really good job telling you all about his daily routines.

So next week, you’re going to start working on lab five, lab five, we’re going to be taking things into the cloud. So for lab five, you’re going to create two droplets on digitalocean, you’re going to set up SSH, so you can connect to your droplets and connect between the droplets, you’ll set up firewalls on your droplets. And we’re just going to start with simple Apache websites. The other big thing you’re going to do is create a DNS name that will point to those droplets. So if you don’t already have your own domain name, now’s a good chance to get one Lab five does require you to sign up for a couple of things online. If you haven’t used these tools before, you can go to education.github.com/pack and try and register for the GitHub student developer pack. Hopefully you did that already. I think I instructed you earlier in the class. But if I forgot, now’s the chance to do it. With the GitHub pack, you get $100 of free digitalocean credit if you’re a new digitalocean user, if you go to Namecheap through the nc.me domain, you can get a $1 DNS name for students. If you haven’t used those tools before, and you have trouble getting the pack, let me know, especially for digitalocean I think I can give you referral credits, I think there are lots of signup codes that you can get. So if you have trouble getting those, basically, if you’ve never used digitalocean, or name cheap before, you should be able to do so for free. At worst, the total cost for this class is $11, you’ll have two digitalocean droplets that are $5 a month will be done in a month. And your name cheap domain is $1. So at worst, it will be $11. Hopefully that works. But if it is trouble, let me know. And I will help you out with that. I also do have a quick caveat for this lab. If you choose not to use any of these cloud resources, that is your right you don’t have to do that. If you want let me know and I will come up with alternative arrangements for you. Generally, I will have you do basically the same things in your VMware VMs as we were doing in the cloud. But I really think in this class, it’s useful for you to get some experience in a real cloud. And I found that digitalocean is the easiest one to use. And so that’s what we’re going to do. I have had several students asked me why we don’t use AWS, Amazon Web Services in this class, and it’s mainly because of ease of use. I find that going from VMware to digitalocean is a little bit smoother of a transition. And then once you’re comfortable with cloud concepts in digitalocean, making the shift from there to Amazon Web Services isn’t too much more. But Amazon Web Services, AWS uses a slightly different model. And I found that students going directly into AWS it, it takes a little bit more work. So that’s why we do digitalocean I think it’s a good choice for this class. So that’s all I got for this week.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. I’m on Discord. As always, I’m also watching my emails, so you can get a hold of me anyway, that anytime that way, we have our zoom discussions every Thursday at 330. Those are good times to ask questions of our guests, but also of me, I also host tea time office hours, I’ll have tea time today at 330. So you can catch me there. We’ll also start doing Fridays at 1030. In a couple weeks, we still have two more weeks of teacher training. And then of course, you can schedule a one on one office hours with me using the exact same calendly link that you use to schedule your grading times. You can schedule a time with me anytime throughout the week when you have questions.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week for the cloud. I’m going to leave you with this quick XKCD comic. I think it’s also in my slides. But it’s really fun thinking about the cloud in terms of it’s really just somebody else’s computer. And so in theory, there could just be one computer out there. That is the cloud for everyone else. So that’s all I’ve got for this week. Good luck on finishing lab four. Good luck on lab five. If you have any questions, let me know and otherwise I look forward to seeing you when we do grading

July 12, 2021

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Hello, and welcome to the week six announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So at this point, you should be working on lab five, which is due tonight by 7pm. I see I’ve got meetings for most everybody already on my calendar. So that’s great. It looks like everybody’s keeping up so far. Then we’ve got our speaker coming up, we didn’t have a speaker last week, we’ve rescheduled Hunter to the week after this one. So you don’t have a response due this week. But you do have questions for our next speaker, which is going to be Sarah. She’s going to be speaking this week. So don’t forget to get those questions turned in. And the next week, you’ll be working on lab six, which is also due by Monday at 7pm.

So for lab five grading today, there are a few things I want you to demonstrate. Usually if everything’s working, this takes less than five minutes, basically will have you SSH to your front end. And then I will also use the grading key to SSH to your front end, we’ll have you check a couple of things they’re around your firewall will SSH to your back end we’ll check the firewall and stuff there. And then lastly, I’ll use basically I’ll just try and load your website using the domain name you give me. And as long as it loads and it has HTTPS and everything you should be good to go. Usually doesn’t take too long as long as everything’s working. But if something’s not working, it’s really important to get this lab figured out because it really builds into the next two labs that you’ll be working on for the rest of this class.

So our speaker this Thursday is Sarah Allen. Sarah is a system administrator for McCown Gordon, a construction company that has an office in Manhattan. They do a lot of construction around campus and in the Manhattan area, as well as here in Kansas City. She also has a former 527 student of mine, and is probably the closest to what you’d see in an industrial helpdesk and support environment. She is basically the frontline support for their construction company. And so she would have a lot of insight into what it’s like to be in that part of the industry.

So coming up, this week, we’ll be working on lab six, which is all about file servers and application servers on the file server side on your VMs. Locally, you’ll be creating a file server on both Ubuntu and on your Windows Server. And then you’ll be setting up some automatic drive mappings on the windows side you’ll use the Group Policy editor to set up a group policy so that those drives automatically mount there. On the Linux side, you’ll edit a couple of config files to have them mount either automatically via fstab, or you’ll use an XML file to set up some auto mounting there. The Ubuntu part is kind of tricky, but like some of the previous labs, I walked through almost the entire process in the video. So just follow along very closely. And hopefully you can get that working. The second part of lab six is setting up some web application servers. On the Linux side, you’ll do this in the cloud, what you’ll actually do is install WordPress from the zip file that you get from WordPress. And you’ll set it up so that the WordPress website runs on your front end server, but it connects to the database that’s on your back end server. And this is a little tricky the first time you’ve done it, but hopefully you can get it working. On the windows side you’ll install probably blog engine dotnet, which is pretty simple you just extracted but then you have to set up a few things on the windows side to get the certificates and all the auto forwarding to work. But again, I give most of this in the lab. So hopefully a lot of lab six is just following along and getting everything installed and working correctly.

Finally, we are down… it’s week six, we got two and a half weeks left. So the last thing you need to be thinking about in this course is your final project. Your final project topic I believe is due at the end of next week. So make sure you get that thought out. The whole idea behind the final project is to build something or fix something that you’re working with, it’s to gain a small amount of hands on experience in this course, it could be building a web resource for a new startup company setting up laptops for a school central authentication system and helpdesk system, discussing whether you want to use thin clients or thick clients and labs. There are tons and tons of ideas. If you need some help, feel free to chat with me for ideas, I’m happy to bounce my ideas around give you some things that are floating around in my mind that you might want to work on. The whole idea for the final project is it is mostly a thought exercise. I don’t intend you to do a whole lot with it. But I want you to sit down and think about how you would set these things up, do some research as to what would be the industry standard way to do this, what would be some different options that you have. And then there is one small part where I want you to implement some little tiny piece of what you’re doing. For example, if you’re talking about building a new web resource for a startup and you think that it would work best on AWS, your little part that you could do is actually set up a server on AWS just to get a little experience working with AWS. If you’re talking about centralized authentication, you might look at installing something like a CAS server, a central authentication system server that authenticates against LDAP or active directory. For thin clients versus thick clients. You can look at some of the management tools for thin clients. There’s all sorts of things out there. You don’t have to do a whole lot But I want you to at least do something that fits with your final project. And then of course, your final project itself is mostly just the presentation and the write up that you will send to me. And that is due by the end of the semester, which is the end of not the week after next, but the week after that one. So end of July.

Finally, I had a couple of questions from students, if you’re having trouble getting the GitHub education pack, especially if your GitHub is not signed up via your .edu email address, you can go directly to digitalocean. Try digitalocean com slash free trial offer and get $100 credits there. If you created a new digitalocean account, I think you might be able to talk to their support folks and get them to apply that offer to your account. For name cheap. If you need a domain name, you can go to nc.me. And as long as you sign up with your .edu email address, you can get a free .me domain for a year. So you can bypass the GitHub education pack completely by just going to those two websites, and getting all the things you need.

Other than that, as always, don’t be afraid to keep in touch. I’m always on Discord. You can email me You can set up times with me via calendly. We have our zoom discussions on Thursdays at 330. I’ve got tee time office hours, Tuesdays at 330. And this week will be the last week that we won’t do Friday. Starting next week. We’ll try and do Friday again. So there’s lots of ways you can get help and ask questions in this course if you run in any trouble.

Other than that, we are nearing the end of the course. And so now’s the time to be thinking about getting your final project done getting things wrapped up making sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row so that you’re ready at the end of the semester to get that turned in. If you have any questions please let me know. Otherwise, I look forward to working with you and seeing your final projects. Good luck.

July 19, 2021

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Hello, and welcome to the week seven announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So we’ve only got two weeks left in the class, which means there’s a lot of stuff wrapping up this week. So don’t forget this week today Monday, your lab six is due by 7pm. Tonight, I see that again, most of you have already scheduled grading appointments, which is great. This Wednesday, we’ve got our next last round of discussion responses due and the questions for our last presenter are due on Wednesday. This Thursday, we’re having our speaker Hunter Guthrie, it’s a reschedule from a couple weeks ago, but hopefully he can make it this Thursday. This Friday, your final project proposal is due by 11:59pm. I’ll talk a little bit about that in just a second. And then next week on Monday is lab seven.

So for lab six grading, there’s a lot of stuff we need to see, but it’s pretty simple. First off, you’ll be setting up a Windows File Server. So I just want you to show me that you’ve got the file server set up that you have the Group Policy set up. And hopefully you can show me that your drive maps actually work on your client. Likewise, with Ubuntu will check your file server setup will check your Samba config. And again, hopefully we go to the client and we can see the auto maps of the shared drives there, you’ll create a Windows web application, you’ll install probably blog engine dotnet and set that all up. And so hopefully all we have to do is open up a web browser on your Windows Server and we’ll check to make sure that works. And then in the cloud, you’ll be installing most likely WordPress for the back end and front end, and so on, we’ll just check some of the config files and check that we can pull that up in a web browser. So lab six, again, is not that bad to grade, if everything’s working, if everything is not working, it can take a little bit of time. But hopefully we’ll get through that. In the next week.

Lab seven is the last lab in this class, it’s kind of a catch all for a whole bunch of things. So have you do some backup and restore, we’ll talk about some monitoring. And we will do some DevOps work. So keep an eye on that I’m probably going to quickly post an update to that lab later today. And I’ll send out an email when I get that done. So you’ll have that lab.

Our speaker this week is again, Hunter Guthrie. He’s a system administrator for Evergy, specifically at the Wolf Creek generating station, which is the nuclear power plant that is south of Topeka. He’s another former student of mine. And I’m hoping it will be interesting because he works in a very highly secure and regulated industry working in nuclear power. So he might have some really interesting things to talk about from his perspective, as well.

So coming up, you’ll need to be working on your final project. It’s due at the end of next week, so you’ve only got two weeks left to work on it. The whole idea for the final project is to build something or fix something or change something related to System Administration, you could create a web resource for a new startup, you could look at something that’s already going and how you want to change that you could discuss how you’d set up laptops for school or designing authentication for a company. Discuss stick clients versus thin clients. Anything is really fair, as long as it relates to this class and system administration in some way. If you need some ideas, feel free to chat with me, you can schedule a time catch me on discord, email me, and I’d be happy to share some ideas around. By this Friday, you need to turn in your final project idea, your topic just needs to be short, like a half page or so, describing your topic and where you’re going. So I can see enough that you’re on the right track. I will try and get to those Saturday and grade those really quickly. So you’ll get some quick feedback for me. But that’s really what I’m looking for is to make sure that you’ve got your final project topic in place by the end of this week. And the next week, you’ll be able to work on your final project and get it presented.

To complete your final project, you need to turn in three things. The first thing you’ll turn in is a written report. There’s a template that I give that’s a basic research paper report. I want you to do some research, propose your final project, whatever your proposal is, and do a SWOT a strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats analysis, you can include graphics and data as needed, I don’t have any minimum or maximum length on this, it should be long enough to convince me If I was your CIO, that this is a good idea or a bad idea and that you’ve done enough analysis and research to understand it and make a convincing case. You’ll also do a live presentation roughly 15 to 30 minutes again, convince me that you’ve analyzed it well and that you’ve done your homework. And then finally, as part of your presentation, you will show a small prototype, this should be very easy. Spend no more than a couple hours on it. But for example, if your presentation is about moving into AWS, your prototype might be set up a server on AWS. If you’re talking about authentication systems, you might download and install a different authentication system. That’s really all I’m looking for in this final project.

The presentation itself you can do live with me via zoom or you can prerecord a video and send that to me, you need to present or send me the video on or before next Friday. One thing I do recommend is that you schedule now my times do get full filled up pretty good Quickly, I might have other things show up on my calendar. So if you want that 430 slot on Friday, schedule it now so that you’ve got it. Also, if you work during the day or you have some conflicts, you can email me for alternative arrangements. I have a couple of time slots after five o’clock on Friday. I can also do after five o’clock on Thursday. So let me know if you’re interested in those times if you got some conflicts. And again, the sooner the better. So you can lock in the time that works for you, so you can get that done.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. I have the slide every week. I’m on Discord. We have zoom discussions. We’ll start doing tea time on both tuesday and friday again, so make sure you keep that in mind. And I also have one on one office hours you can schedule with me anytime on calendly.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week. Hopefully it’ll be working on your final projects, getting your labs wrapped up, you’ll make some PowerPoint slides or something. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know otherwise Good luck this week and I hope to see you again soon.

July 26, 2021

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Hello, and welcome to the week eight announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, here we are, it’s the last week of the class. This week, you should be working on lab seven, which is due tonight, it’s due by 11:59pm. And I’ll explain that in just a sec. We also have the week seven discussion response that’s due on Wednesday. So make sure you get that in. I’ll get the video posted later today. For Friday, your final projects to do by 1159 at night, and we’ll talk a little bit about that. And then we’ll also talk about TEVALS.

So first off, for lab seven grading, you really don’t need to meet with me via zoom to do lab seven grading. As long as everything’s working, you should be able to submit stuff via Canvas, and I’ll be able to grade it from there. However, if you’re having trouble or something isn’t quite working, it’s probably best to schedule a time for grading. So we can poke around and at least get you partial credit. So specifically on lab seven, for task one, the windows AD backup, I just need screenshots. For task two, the MySQL backup, you’ll send a zip file with your backup and a readme document describing how to restore it. For three, you’re going to install Munin or Ganglia. And so you’ll just send me the URL that those are working on. And I should be able to see those there. For task four the DevOps, you should be able to add me to your Git lab on the CS Git lab server, and then send me the URL of the website that it points to. And so I’ll make a post basically on Git lab. And I will check your server to make sure that the URL updates to see the new content. And then finally, for extra credit, if you do the extra credit, there’s just some screenshots to show me that you got the dashboards working. So all of that can be submitted on canvas. And so you can work until midnight tonight to get that submitted. And I will try and get that graded early this week once I get them submitted.

So again, for your final project, you’ve got a written report that you’re working on. There’s a template that I give that talks about all the different sections you might have in your report. Basically, your report is talking about what your presentation is: going through your proposal talking about your analysis and giving me a conclusion. So you can include graphics and data, there’s really no minimum or maximum size, what I generally tell people is make it long enough so that I understand what you’re talking about, and short enough that I don’t get bored reading it. Your presentation, you need to schedule at least 15 minutes, I recommend scheduling a 30 minute time slot for it. And basically, you’re going to present your material and convince me that you’ve analyzed it well. And that it either is a good idea based on your analysis, or it isn’t a good idea based on your analysis. So if you haven’t scheduled that, please make sure you get your presentation time scheduled soon. So you get the time slot you want. I’m mostly free Thursday and Friday. So you should be able to find a time that works, I hope. And we’ll talk about scheduling in just a second. And then also don’t forget, you should have a small prototype as part of your project, it should be pretty easy spend a couple hours on it. So if you need any ideas for ways that you can include a prototype in your project, feel free to contact me and let me know.

So like I said the presentation it can be given either live or you can pre record a video. You should present on or before Friday and specifically on or before Friday at 5pm. Unless you email me and make alternate arrangements. I don’t intend on watching any presentations at 11 o’clock on Friday night. But I can do a few shortly after five, especially for people that work eight to five, I can work around that schedule. So please make sure you either schedule your presentation ASAP, or email me to make alternative arrangements so that we can make sure that your presentation gets done on time.

Also, this week, you should be getting a TEVAL from the K-State TEVAL System. Please take some time to respond to that. That’s the only real way that I get feedback from you about what to do and what to change about this class. It’s totally anonymous, I can’t see any of your feedback until final grades are submitted in this semester. Actually, I don’t think I can see these till like the end of August. So all your comments and feedback are well welcome both positive and negative. I really do appreciate all your feedback. And if you talk to anybody that’s taken this class previously, they will tell you that it has changed a lot specifically based on their TEVAL feedback. So it’s really helpful for me if you take some time to respond honestly and thoughtfully to that feedback, and I really appreciate it. Also once we get all the grades done, Final Grades should be posted on I believe Monday or Tuesday next week. At once I get done with grading I will email the class and let you know that the grades you see in Canvas is the grade that you will get in KSIS. Once that email goes out if you notice any problems on your grades either now or when that email comes out. Email me ASAP if you have any concerns. One of the things I will be doing soon is going through and making sure all the late penalties are properly assessed in the gradebook. So your grades may fluctuate a little bit as I get all of that cleaned up in the gradebook. But I will probably send an email Monday next week letting you know that grades are final and you’ll be able to take a look and make sure everything looks the way you expect. I don’t think there shouldn’t be any surprises in this course at this point.

Other than that, please make sure you keep on keep in touch with me. You’re welcome to chat with me on discord anytime. We also continue to have our tea time office hours Tuesdays at 330 And Fridays at 1030 and will continue that through the rest of the summer I believe so please make sure you’re more than welcome to join there. And then of course, you can always schedule time with me on calendly to meet with me via one on one office hours. I’m always happy to do that. Even if you just want to chat about life or the universe or anything else that’s going on, feel free to connect with me anytime you want. So other than that, that’s getting toward the end of this class. This is probably the last announcements video you’ll see for me. It’s been a pleasure having you all in my class this semester, and I look forward to seeing your final projects and I wish you the best of luck.

Fall '21 Week 1

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Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. My name is Russell Feldhausen, and I’ll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is listed here, and it’s also listed on the syllabus, feel free to contact me anytime. Email is my preferred method of communication for this class. But you can also find me on Discord, you can schedule one on one office hours via Calendly. And there’s lots of other options that are listed on my website and on the syllabus.

So this class is a class that I’ve taught for several semesters at this point. So there’s not a whole lot that’s new this time around. Basically, you’ll have one module of work due every other week. There is a late work penalty in this class, it’s 10% off of the total points possible on the assignment per day, so make sure you don’t get too far behind. I also have added a prototype portion to the final project. So if you’re familiar with previous versions of this class, that’s a little bit new here. In every semester I also make minor changes in each labs. So make sure that you’re reading the labs for the current semester in this Canvas course. We’ll also watch the videos from five interactive discussions that we did in the summer semester. Unfortunately, this fall I right now, I only have a couple of students in this class. So we’re not going to do new discussions this fall. But between the group we might have some more discussions on Discord and things like that.

Also, during the semester, I’m hoping to do some updates to the curriculum for this class going forward. So my hope is later in the semester, I may have a couple of beta labs to have you try, we’ll come up with some way that you can opt into the beta labs and help me test them for some credit. I’m considering maybe even replacing the last module in this class with one of these beta labs. So we’ll see how far we get on that in this semester. This is all very up in the air right now. But if I get enough time, I want to work on this. So watch for more details later.

This class uses interactive grading for labs to get lab graded, you’ll schedule a time with me via Calendly the time that you schedule must be before you can before the lab is due, but you can schedule even before you’re done with the lab. So for example, if you’re working on your lab on Friday, and you think you’ll get done over the weekend, you can go ahead and schedule your grading time on Monday, which would be the due date. And then you can meet with me on Monday so you can schedule before you’re done. But your meeting must be before the due date. Scheduling via Calendly requires a four hour notice. So if you want to schedule right before something’s due or right at the end of the day, it’s not going to let you. When we meet, we’ll meet via zoom, and I’ll have you use screenshare. So I can see what you’re seeing and have you walked through some things on your lab. And then one of the big things to be aware of is when we start grading, I will ask you if you’re sure you want to start. And as soon as you confirm that at that time, what’s there is there you can’t make any changes. Once you’ve started grading, even if you notice something that’s missing, it’s kind of like you turned in the assignment to me and then later on, you realized you missed something, you can’t go back and fix it. So it’s the only way I can really keep it fair when I do these interactive grading things. So just be aware that once you start grading, you can’t change anything, it’s going to be whatever I see as we go through. So keep keep that in mind. It’s usually not a problem. But everyone’s while students will realize, Oh crap, I forgot to turn on the firewall. It’s already too late. So keep that in mind.

This semester, we’ve got some interactive discussions you’ll be able to do. We recorded these during the summer 2021 semester, we brought in some guest speakers, they got to interact with our students. For this fall, what I’d like you to do is watch the video of those discussions and write a reaction to it based on the prompt that I give. If, as you watch the video, if you have any questions, all of the speakers from last summer, volunteered their email addresses so you can email me, I will forward your information on to our speaker and they will get back to you. They’re more than willing to answer your questions, especially some of the speakers like the K-State’s CIO, and I know both Seth and Kyle here in the computer science department would love to talk to students any time so don’t be afraid to reach out to them. But I’d be happy to send an email on your behalf to get some answers.

Other than that, that’s really all that’s going on this semester. Hopefully everything’s pretty self explanatory on Canvas. If you have any questions, let me know anytime. What I’d like you to do from here on out is keep in touch on Discord. The first module has you do a quick introduction on Discord so we know you’re there. So you can always discuss things with me on Discord. As I see news and things during the semester, you might see postings in the Discord channel relevant to this class. So keep an eye on that. We can also do look for our Zoom discussions. And then of course, we have time office hours if you’re not familiar with those every Tuesday 330 and Friday at 1030. I and some other faculty we host a tea time office hours. Tea Time is not meant to be time to ask questions about class. It’s more time to hang out and socialize and ask questions about life, the universe in general, anything outside of class that you want to talk about, we’d be happy to help. So feel free to come join us for tea time. And then of course, you can always schedule a one on one office hours with me using Calendly.

So I wish you the best of luck this semester. Good luck on all your classes. Good luck on this class. Let me know if you have any questions and I look forward to interacting with you in a couple weeks when you get the first lab graded.

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.

Fall '21 Week 5

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Hello, and welcome to the announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021, I’m coming to you today from the CS video studio here on campus. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that a couple more times this semester. But that’s probably why things look a little bit different today than your normal announcements video. So this week, you should be working on lab two, which is due tonight by 11:59pm. We’ll talk about turning that in here in just a second. There’s also the first discussion that’s due tonight. So if you haven’t participated in the discussions, you’ll need to fill out your response to the video by tonight. And then we’ll talk about lab three a little bit later. It’s tentatively due on October 4. But as we’ll discuss here in just a minute, that might change.

So for lab two, you’ll be working on manifest files for puppet, all you have to do is submit those via Canvas, there’s no Live Meeting required. And once you submit those on Canvas, I’ll actually grade them on my system and give you feedback. Usually I grade those tomorrow. So you should get feedback pretty quickly on those. But if you have any questions on this lab, please let me know.

So for lab three, you’re going to be diving into the world of networking. So in this lab, we’re going to set up an Ubuntu server by basically duplicating one of our existing a boon to VMs. We’ll set static IP address on it. And then we’ll install a lot of core networking services, DNS, DHCP, SNMP. There’s a lot of technical stuff in here. And it’s a lot of reading documentation and figuring out how to configure those systems using their config file format. DNS especially is very, very particular. So make sure you check out the hints for this lab, make sure you check out the networking diagrams for this lab. And please ask questions. If something doesn’t make sense. Let me know I’d be happy to talk you through it and see if I can figure out how best to make that work.

So real quick update on the schedule. I will be going on vacation starting a week from Friday, October the first and that will be gone through that next week. During that time I’ll be traveling a lot so I will have limited access to email and Discord. But I will try and check in once a day and make sure I answer any questions that are out there. Because of that the normal grading time for lab three would be October 4, which is the Monday. I will absolutely be out of town that day and not able to do live grading that day. So what I’d like to do is see if we can shoot for having lab three done by September 30, which is the day before I leave on that Thursday, I will email the class directly and see if you’d like to go for that due date or if you’d like to adjust things to be later. If nothing else, I can grade lab three a little bit later and kind of do lab three and lab four together. Lab four will still be due October the 18th. I think we should be able to do that that shouldn’t be a problem. But keep in mind that I will be gone for at least a week and will adapt, so watch for an email for me and I will let you know exactly what the plan is for getting lab three graded.

Other than that, don’t be afraid to keep in touch. I’m on Discord. I’m on zoom discussions. We have tee time office hours. I think everybody in this class is doing a really good job keeping up with me. But if you have any questions, let me know. You can email me catch me on discord, schedule a one on one office hour with me whatever works best for you. So other than that, that’s all this week. Hopefully you enjoy building some networking this week. It’s a really cool part of system administration, and it’s where we start diving into the more technical parts of this class. As always, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck.

Fall '21 Week 9

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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.

Fall '21 Week 12

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Hello, and welcome to the week 12 Announcements video for CC 510 in fall 2021. So coming up this week, you’ve got lab six, that’s due a Monday. So about six days from now at 7pm, you should hopefully be working on that right now. And then after that most of the deadlines move to December where you have December 3, your final project proposal is due; December 6, we have lab seven that is due and then you have until the end of finals week on December 17, to actually present your final project to me, so there’s not a whole lot left in this class.

For lab six grading, there’s basically four distinct parts to that lab: we’ll check out your Windows file server on your VMs and your Ubuntu file server on your VMs will also check out the Windows web application on your VMs. And then you should have an Ubuntu web application running in the cloud. Of note, remember, for the Windows web application, I show you how to install one application in the videos. And I give you a pointer to install a different one for your lab. So make sure you install the one in the lab. Don’t install the forum, I believe it’s blog engine dotnet that I have you install, you can find another dotnet web application. But blog engine dotnet is by far the easiest. Likewise, for the cloud web application, I show you how to install one thing, I believe I encourage you to install WordPress. And specifically in the cloud, we’re setting it up so that you have a front end server and then the database is on a separate server. So we have to connect those two as well. Then we’ll move on to lab seven. Lab seven is a little catch all it covers a lot of different topics such as backup and restore monitoring DevOps, it’s a little bit everything, it’s kind of the last few things that I wanted to cover in this class. So you’ll have plenty of time to work on lab seven, it’s in several discrete parts as well, so you can work on it. However that works in your schedule.

So for your final project, I believe I’ve talked to everybody a little bit about the final project in this class. But as a quick summary, the whole idea is to either build something or fix something related to the world of system administration. It could be a web resource for a startup company, you could figure out a way to automatically set up laptops for a school, you could design some sort of a central authentication process for a company, discuss things like the benefits of thin clients versus thick clients and labs and offices. If you haven’t come up with a good idea yet, feel free to schedule a time to chat with me about some ideas, I’d love to throw some ideas around and see what’s interesting to you. But the idea is I want you to demonstrate that you’ve learned something in this class by applying the things you’ve learned towards some sort of a final project that you’re interested in.

So to complete your final project, there are three big things that you’ll turn in. The first thing you’ll turn in is a written report. In the final project materials, I give you a small template to give you an idea of what sections you should have in your written report. For clarity, the template uses bullet points to explain what the section should contain. Your report should be a formal written essay, not a list of bullet points - I’ve had some students get confused on that. But the bullet points in the template simply show you what goes in that section. In your written report, you’re going to talk about the research you’ve done in your project propose your idea. Give me a SWOT analysis, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. And then of course, don’t forget the wrap up use the outcome of your SWOT analysis to convince me as your CIO, that it’s either a good idea or a bad idea. And it’s totally okay for the idea that you propose. After you go through the SWOT analysis, you realize, that’s a bad idea, we shouldn’t do that. Your written report, you can include in graphics data, whatever as needed, there is no minimum or maximum length I tell you, you need to write enough so that it covers the topic, but not so much that I would get bored reading it. And that’s really all I’ll say, depending on your topic, it might be longer or shorter, but it needs to be cohesive, it needs to have everything in there. And you need to make a convincing case one way or the other for your project. Then you’ll do a live presentation, you can either record a video of yourself presenting, you can do that in zoom or any other tool that you have, or you can schedule a time to meet with me, we’ll hop on Zoom and you can present live, your presentation should run about 15 to 30 minutes plus some time for questions. And it basically goes through the same content in your written report. Again, the idea is to convince me that you have thought through your process, you have done your analysis and you really understand what you’re proposing and the good or bad. The other thing I want you to do for this final project is a small prototype. The prototype is some small self contained part of your larger presentation. So for example, if your project is to take everything on a website and move it into containers, so that you can deploy it on Kubernetes. Maybe your small prototype is to figure out how to get Docker running on DigitalOcean. So very, very small, self contained part of your project. But it shows me that you’ve actually done something a little bit hands on. I tell most people you should spend around two to four hours on the prototype, which is not an awful lot of time. It’s, you know enough time to figure out how to install Docker, maybe set up your own Docker container or something like that. That’s all I want. And then as part of your live presentation, you will show me the small prototype that you’ve been working on as well.

So, like I said, the presentation, it can be either live or pre recorded, you present on or before the Friday of dead week. If you want your err, sorry, the Friday of finals week, if you want, you’re welcome to schedule. Now my Calendly link is open, it shows stuff all the way out through December. If Monday through Friday, eight to five doesn’t work well for you, you can email me for alternative arrangements, I’m more than happy to work with that, especially if I’ve got a little bit of prior knowledge. So be thinking about your presentation. It’s about a month from now. But you can go ahead and get it on the schedule. Now if you want to make sure you reserve the time that you want.

So other than that, I think things are going really well in this class. It looks like everybody’s getting caught up and getting toward the end of the semester. As always, if you have any questions you can catch me on Discord you can find me on Tea Time, you can catch me for one on one, office hours, whatever works best for you. Otherwise, I hope everything’s going well hopefully for your project you can think about you know me making a PowerPoint or something or you know, I’ve had students for their final project not do any PowerPoints at all or they’ve done something completely different. So feel free to make your final project presentation fit with whatever your style is. I look forward to seeing it and let me know if you have any questions.

Fall '22 Week 1

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.