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This video was recorded before I decided to switch to Ed Discussion instead of using Discord. All discussions of âDiscordâ can be applied to âEd Discussionâ instead. Sorry for the confusion! - Russ
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510. In Fall 2023, my name is Russ Feldhausen. Iâll be your instructor for this semester, my contact information can be found here. Itâs also on the syllabus. Itâs also on the cannabis page. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns at all in this class. I also have one teaching assistant this semester, Matt Schwartz, Matt is going to be working with me to help you if you have any questions on the labs, heâs also going to be helping me with doing some of the grading Matt did this class last year, I believe. So heâs pretty familiar with a lot of the content. And heâs going to be working right alongside you to check all the labs for me. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either of us, weâre happy to help. In this course, just like a lot of courses, itâs built with gated modules on canvas. Thereâs one module due every other week in this class, so please check the due dates very carefully. Each module includes a lab assignment, that lab assignment requires a live grading portion, which means youâll work with either Matt or myself via zoom, so that we can grade your work, it means that this is a very labor intensive class. So please be aware of that. Weâre also going to have some discussions throughout the semester. So youâll either have a recorded video to watch, or Iâll bring in a guest speaker and youâll have the opportunity to join a live zoom and speak with one of our guest speakers. And then finally, at the end of the semester, weâll have a final project.
So for discussion of this course, Iâve set up a channel on the CIS Discord server. So I please encourage you to use discord. One of the early assignments is to go to discord and introduce yourself there so that you can find the channel and make sure youâre in the right place. So please make sure you do that. If you have any questions, personal issues, grading questions, etc. Iâve set up a help email for this class, which is cis527-help. If youâre in any of the case, Dave email systems, if you just type CIS 527 Dash, it should autocomplete email is kind of our official method for communication in this class, Discord is a little bit more flexible. In general, feel free to ask questions on Discord. But if itâs personal stuff, grading stuff, feel free to put that in an email, that cis 527 Help email goes to both Matt and I and whoever is the first one available, weâll answer that for you as best we can. So success in this course, learning to be a system administrator is difficult. And it is a different way of thinking compared to a lot of the programming that youâve done. Because thereâs simultaneously one way to do things. And thereâs also many way to do things in a lot of ways. So to be successful in this course, you really need to come at it with a growth mindset, itâs going to be tricky, youâre going to break stuff, youâre going to run into issues. And so you have to be willing to sit down and try and learn. But I guarantee you, you can learn how to do any of this if you just take the time to do it. The second big thing about being a successful sysadmin is donât just read or watch content, but engage with it. Thereâs a lot of content where Iâm just going to sit there and go line by line through a config file, or Iâm going to discuss some concepts. And if you just read the video, read the text or watch the video and just go oh yeah, I got it. That may not be enough, you may really need to engage with it and follow along and do those examples yourself. So to really see and understand how itâs working. A lot of these labs involve multiple parts. So please work iteratively get one part working, make sure itâs working, then move on to the next part. One of the most frustrating things in this class is when somebody brings me a lab, itâs like, oh, yeah, I tried to do this and it didnât work. So then I tried to do this and it didnât work. And so then I tried to do this and it didnât work. And so theyâve got like three or four broken things in their lab instead of just one that they can focus on. And itâs hard to tell where the error is. The other nice thing is weâre using VMware for all of this. So VMware has a very nice snapshot feature. So just like any other class, save early and save often make yourself snapshots. Anytime you get something working, I always hate that situation where a student breaks a VM. And then they donât have any snapshots. And they have to start over. And it happens every semester. And I will guarantee it will happen this semester. So make sure youâre making snapshots early and often and using them all the time. Itâs just like playing a video game, youâre walking into a boss fight, auto save before you going to the boss fight. The same thing happens in this course. Finally, donât be afraid to ask for help. There are always situations in this course where something will not work, right or you will do something and it doesnât work the same on your computer as it does on every other every other computer. Donât assume that youâre stupid or that youâre having trouble. Please ask for help. It is very easy in this course to back yourself into a corner. And almost every semester thereâs a student that has something happened on their system that even I canât debug. And so donât sit there and just spin your wheels. If you get stuck and youâre not making progress, ask for help. Let us know Matt and I are here to help. So donât be afraid to reach out and let us know if you have any questions.
So like I talked about the lab grading this course there are seven labs. Most of them are graded interactively. I think there are two labs that we submit everything online. For the interactive grading, what youâll do is youâll schedule a grading time via Calendly, we recommend choosing a 15 or 20 minute time slot, please, for my own sanity, please check the TA schedule first, Matt gets paid to do this hourly. So the more times that he can grade stuff, the more money he makes. So please feel free to check that schedule first and see if you can get on his schedule. If not feel free to get on my schedule, you can schedule your lab time before youâre done with the lab. But the lab grading must happen before the due date. I think most of the labs are due on Friday. And so you should schedule your lab grading time before Friday at 5pm. There are 25 of you in this class, which means if we do for an hour, that still takes six hours, at least, to grade everything. So thatâs like I said, itâs very labor intensive to do this class. So please be aware, you may not get that early time if you donât schedule ahead. The other thing is my Calendly, especially requires anywhere from two to four hours notice. So if you get done with the lab at four oâclock on Friday and want to try and find a grading time between four oâclock and five oâclock on Friday, itâs not going to be there. So please be aware of that schedule your grading times in advance. You when we do grading, weâll bring it up on Zoom, weâll have you share your screen pointed at VMware, we will ask you to walk through things in your VMs and show us that itâs working correctly, we may ask you to run commands, we may ask you to show us config files, we may ask you to do certain things. Thatâs our way of confirming issues, your systems work the way they should. The last thing, once you start grading, you cannot make a change. For example, if you pull up a config file and realize that something is wrong, itâs too late, you canât make that change. So please make sure that you have everything done before you do any grading. Because once you start that grading process, it is the way it is. And we have to take it as you submit it. We try and be pretty lenient with partial credit, but do your own testing, make sure things are working before you go for lab grading.
So this year, one of the things I want to do, again, is discussions a couple years ago, I brought in some guest speakers. Now Iâve got a big class this semester, I think itâd be fun to do that again. So Iâve got a survey, itâs on the first page of the discussions module, itâs a little when to meet survey, please respond to that survey by Friday, August 25. Iâm going to take the most common overlap time or maybe one or two of those and make those into zoom discussion times. On most weeks, Iâll just have them zoom office hours, but a few times throughout the semester, I will try and bring in some guest speakers. In years past I had Seth Galitzer, I got K-Stateâs CIO, Kyle Hutson to talk about supercomputers. Iâve had a couple of folks from industry that have come in. So itâs a really great chance to learn more about being a system administrator, and all the different ways that that looks out in the real world. And so part of your grade will come from participating in those discussions, youâll submit some questions beforehand that I can pick from, and then youâll either participate in the live discussion on Zoom, or youâll watch the video and write a response afterwards. But itâs a really good way to learn more about system administration in the field itself. So I think this is a really fun part of this class. So thatâs really all Iâve got for this first week of announcements. As always, if you have any questions, join the discussion on Discord. Iâll be looking forward to seeing your announcements, your introduction posts there, and Iâll be pretty active on Discord throughout the semester. I also host Tea Time office hours, which are Mondays at 11 oâclock this year, youâll see some information being posted about that shortly. The Tea Time officers are available on campus in person, but theyâre also held on zoom so you can join either way. And then of course, both Matt and I will have some one on one office hours available via Calendly. So you can schedule some time there. But again, bear in mind, thereâs 25 of you in this class. Itâs a very labor intensive class. So please be mindful and try and do the best you can working with us on Discord and some other things. And then schedule the office hours if you need that time to work with us directly. Because weâre going to be really overloaded trying to keep up with 25 students in this class. So thatâs all I got for this semester. Iâm rooting for you. Good luck. I hope everything goes well. Youâll probably see me every other week. Usually since this is an every other week class. I usually post announcement videos every other week. So watch for an announcement video probably the day after Labor Day this year. If you have any questions or concerns, let us know otherwise, I look forward to interacting with you on Discord and I will see you in a couple of weeks.
Hello, and welcome to the week one Announcements video for system administration during summer 2022. My name is Russell Feldhausen. Iâll be your instructor for this course, my contact information is shown here. You can also find it on the syllabus and on the homepage on K-State canvas, itâs by far the best way to get a hold of me is to just email me. But as I discussed in the intro video, and as Iâll discuss here, for anything related to the course, please use discord, itâs a great place for us to chat and you should get some very quick responses from you there. So a little bit about the structure in the course.
This course uses gated Modules in Canvas, there is about one module due per week. So if you look at the Modules tab, you can already see the first few modules published there. Please make sure you check the due dates on all of the assignments in the modules. The due dates are kind of spread out throughout the week sometimes. So make sure that youâre aware of the due dates that are upcoming, especially for the lab assignments. For these lab assignments, weâre going to do live grading, which means that you need to schedule a time to meet with me via zoom, and then Iâll be able to watch your screen using screen share. Have you walked through the lab live with me watching. And thatâs how weâll do the grading, you need to not only schedule your grading time, but actually have the grading time before the due date. So if a lab is due Friday at five, you need to schedule and meet with me before Friday at five to get full credit on that lab.
Thereâs also some discussions those are separated out in their own module, the discussions have their own due dates that are a little bit different than the rest of the weeks. So make sure you check those out. Because we have a small enrollment this semester, I didnât go to the effort of actually bringing in new discussion speakers. So weâre going to watch the videos from last summer that I still feel are very relevant. And youâll have a chance to respond to those and ask some more questions that I will then pass on to those speakers and see if I can get some answers. Also, this course has a final project, the final project module is upfront, so you can check it out right away. Be thinking about your final project. As you work through these first few labs, you donât actually have to have a full proposal for your final project until toward the end of class. But the sooner you can come up with an idea and start thinking about it, the easier it will be to do down the road.
So as I said, for course communication, I prefer to use discord for any course questions or discussions. So if you have a question on a lab, if youâre not sure how to do something, if you want to chat about anything, Discord would probably be your best place to start. Iâll be there all of the other students will be there, itâs a great place to get questions answered, you might actually get answers from folks that are outside of this class if they pop in and help out a little bit with that. So Discord is definitely your first place to go. Email is the official form of communication here. Mainly itâs for personal issues, grading questions to dues. But if you ask a question on Discord, and you donât get an answer, feel free to email it to me. And I will guarantee that youâll get a response from me within one business day. So like I said, email is official. But Discord is a bit more flexible for communications. Thatâs why Iâm pointing most things to discord. But email is still there for official.
So to be successful in this course, first and foremost, you need to come into this course with a growth mindset, you can learn how to do this, it is going to be difficult, and especially some of these labs are meant to be a little bit of a struggle. If you havenât done some of these things before, itâs going to feel kind of frustrating to do it the first time, part of the point is working through that frustration and learning how to get past it because the second time you do it, it will be much easier. Another big thing I really encourage you to do, as youâre working through the content in this course, donât just mindlessly watch or read the content, but actually try and engage with the content. A lot of the content that youâre going to see in the lab, in the lab textbooks in the videos that I do in all of the activities that you see, really is helping you work toward the lab. So if youâve gone through that content, and really engaged in it and tried to learn it, the labs should be much, much easier. For the labs themselves, I really encourage you to try and work iteratively, pick one task in the lab and try and get that working as best you can before you move on to the next task. It makes it much easier to make sure that youâve got things working in debug problems before you move on. Another big thing to really keep in mind is to save your work early and save it often VMware the virtualization tool that weâre going to use support snapshots, you definitely have to create a snapshot before the end of lab one. And most students learned the hard way that itâs much, much easier to take a snapshot before you try and install it, configure something and then roll back to that snapshot. If you screw it up versus trying to uninstall and undo all the configuration youâve done snapshots work really great and VMware, please take advantage of that. And then finally, donât be afraid to ask for help. You know, like I said, part of this class is exploring on your own and reading documentation. But if you get stuck and youâre not making progress for about a half hour or so, thatâs a good sign that you need to take a step back and come and ask for help. I really hate to see students spinning their wheels on something in this class and then later on finding out that it wasnât something they could have solved anyway. So if you get stuck, try and get past it if you can, but if not, donât be afraid to ask for help.
So I talked about this a little bit earlier. But for the lab grading each lab, youâre going to schedule a time with me via Calendly for grading. The two exceptions are lab two, you donât have to do live grading. And I believe right now lab seven is set up that way, but Iâm changing some parts of lab seven. So that may change toward the end of the semester, you can schedule your time for grading before the lab is complete, as long as the time that we will meet is after the lab is complete. So feel free to go in on Monday and schedule a time for Friday afternoon, if you are sure that youâre going to have the lab done by Friday afternoon, totally fine. Calendly does require you to give me four hours notice. So if you try and go online and Friday at two and try and schedule a time for Friday at four, itâs not going to be available. So you need to make sure you get your lab schedules taken care of ahead of time, you can even go ahead and just ask me for a weekly timeslot. And Iâm happy to set that up for you. When we do the lab grading, weâll connect via zoom will use screen sharing so I can see what youâre seeing and have you walked me through different things on your virtual machines. And then the other big thing about lab grading is once we start grading, you cannot go through and change things. So if weâre halfway through grading, and you realize you did something wrong, itâs already too late. Because we started the grading process, itâs already been submitted as it were. And so bear in mind that once you start the grading process, you canât change anything, even if you notice that itâs wrong.
So I also touched on this a little bit earlier, Iâm normally in this class, I try and bring in guest speakers for discussions. However, weâve got a very small group this semester. And because I had some really good discussions last summer, I think Iâm just going to reuse those videos from last summer. So for the discussions, this time, youâll get a chance to watch the video and write a reaction to the video. And then youâre also going to come up with a few questions for that speaker. And once I get all those submissions, I will actually send those on to that speaker and see if I can get a written response back that I can share with the class. So even though you may not get to interact directly with these speakers, theyâre more than willing to chat with you offline via email. So Iâm happy to pass questions around based on those discussions. So thatâs really everything you need to know to get started in this class.
Like I said, please feel free to keep in touch. The first module has you do a quick introduction on Discord. So make sure you get that done soon. You can join us on Discord for chatting anytime I will be there Iâll probably be posting news and articles throughout the summer just to keep the engagement up. Another thing you can do to keep in touch is several of the computer science faculty host what we call t time office hours. Those are Tuesdays at 3:30 and Fridays at 10:30. Throughout the summer. Tea Time is meant to be an open office hours time where you can come in and chat about anything except classwork that youâre working on. So life university if you need advice, if you just need to hang out with people, a lot of times itâs just me and the faculty hanging out and having a lot of fun while we work on other things. So feel free to join us for tea time. I think itâs a really great opportunity to be able to get to know some folks in industry and some faculty. Sometimes we have alumni folks dropped by. So check out tee time. And then of course, if you need any help, you can always schedule one on one office hours through Calendly. Itâs the same link that you use for grading. So feel free to grab a time if you need some one on one help from me as well.
So thatâs all Iâve got for this weekâs announcements. Youâre welcome to get started on the class. I wish you the best of luck throughout the semester. Iâll try and post a weekly announcements video usually sometime on Monday. That gives you some updates on the next weekâs work. And so keep an eye out for that. Youâll also see me post things on Discord every once in a while but best of luck to you this summer and I look forward to working with you throughout the semester. Good luck
Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2023. Iâll try and post announcements videos like this about every other week in this class. Usually these announcements videos are pretty informal, so youâll notice I donât have my background set up or anything, but itâs just a chance for me to talk through some things that are on my mind, things that I would normally announce at the beginning of class if we were meeting in person. But instead, I think itâs much easier to do these quick videos is.
So first things first, you should be working on lab one and you should be hopefully getting to the point where youâre about ready to get it graded. So what youâll need to do to get your labs graded is youâll need to schedule a time slot to meet with either Matt or myself. My preference is that you check Mattâs schedule first. The only reason I say that is because there are 26 of you and thereâs only one of me, and Iâm currently teaching three classes officially and three classes unofficially. So my schedule is very packed this semester and so Iâm really relying on Matt to cover a lot of the grading load, but Iâm available as well. So please schedule a time slot. Check mattâs calendar first. If Mattâs times donât work for you, then check my calendar and pick a time with me. When youâre ready to get graded. Make sure you make snapshots in VMware so that you can roll back to those snapshots if anything breaks. And then when itâs time for grading, please have everything ready. That means have your VMs open, have them up and running. Have files open, whatever we ask you to do so that it goes really quickly. And then just be prepared to demonstrate your work for this first lab. Weâre going to ask you to show us a few settings on each of your systems. And weâre going to ask you to run a couple of terminal commands that will show all the file permissions for the docs folders that you made. So be prepared to do some of that. Typically, lab grading only takes about ten minutes per lab if everything thing is working correctly. However, if things are not working correctly, it can take much longer as we try and diagnose problems and look for partial credit. Um. When weâre doing lab grading, we may not work with you long enough to fix those problems. You may want to schedule a follow up time to get some problems fixed, especially in labs three and four where those labs build on each other. This first lab, donât worry about it. Weâre going to delete these VMs as soon as weâre done with them, so donât worry too much about it. This is just an introductory lab, but be aware that thatâs what weâre doing with the lab grading, so let us know if you have any questions on that. But donât be afraid to schedule your time slot. And to be clear, you can schedule your time slot now, as long as that time slot happens after you get the lab done. So if you want to get graded next Wednesday when itâs due, I believe itâs Tuesday or Wednesday when itâs due, go ahead and schedule the time slot that works for you. Itâll be on our calendars. And then make sure you have the lab done before that time slot. Do not wait until the due date to try and schedule your time slot because A, most of them will be full, and B, most, I believe Mattâs calendar does. And I know my calendar requires anywhere from two to 4 hours prior notice to schedule a time. So be aware of that.
The other thing that Iâve done is Iâve scheduled our weekly discussion times for Thursdays from one to 02:00 p.m.. That was the time slot that worked best for most people in this class and also fits my schedule. So what weâll be doing with that is Iâm going to reach out to a few friends of mine and try and get a few guest speakers to come in during those discussion times to tell you about their jobs in it and what they do. So Iâll be posting a schedule for that very soon. Some of these will be repeats from previous semesters, but Iâm also going to try and get a couple of new people if I can find some, so be aware of that. So to earn points for the discussions, youâll notice that there are five graded discussions throughout the semester. What youâll do is youâll submit two questions before the scheduled discussion time. So I will be updating those and posting those as soon as I get the schedule figured out. Then you can either attend the live discussion with our guest speaker Thursday from one to 02:00 P.m. That week. Or if youâre not available, you can watch the video afterwards. Either one. To earn points. If you attend live and participate by asking a question, youâll get points. If you attend live and donât ask a question or you watch a video, there will be a short response that I will have you write afterwards. So you donât have to participate if you donât want to. There are ways to earn points either way, and then for weeks where we donât have a scheduled guest speaker, I will just use those times as office hours. Matt may also be available during those times, so I will hop in the Zoom session. If you have questions, join us and ask us any questions you have. If nobody shows up after about ten or 15 minutes, I will tend to drop out of the Zoom session. But those are kind of our open office hours times. If you have any questions for us on days that are not scheduled for a guest speaker.
The other big thing in this class if you need any help, there are a couple of different ways I recommend getting help. First and foremost, thereâs the CIS 527 help email address that is posted on the Canvas website. That address goes to myself and Matt, so we can both answer those questions very quickly. Weâve also set up an Ed discussion board for this course that you can find on Canvas linked on the side. Ed Discussion is a great place to get questions answered in this class because itâs got a lot of features where we can post code and snippets and things like that. And any of your questions you post can be seen by others in the class. So itâs a great way where we only have to answer a question once, especially if itâs a popular question and someoneâs confused on it. If either of those donât work, you can also schedule a time via calendar with either myself or Matt to get some one on one help. And then of course, youâre also welcome to attend the office hours on Thursdays if weâre not having a guest speaker that week. So thatâs all the real updates that Iâve got for this week. Hopefully things are going well with the first lab up. Hopefully by now youâve gotten access to VMware and youâve gotten access to the Microsoft Store so you can get VMware installed, get Windows installed. If you havenât done that, I recommend doing that now. If you have any issues with that, let us know. It may take us a day or so to go through the process to get that fixed. So again, do not wait until the last minute to start on these labs. We really want you to be successful, and that means starting early. So, as always, if you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I will probably post another video next week. Good luck.
Hello and welcome to the Week Three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in Fall 2023. So this week lab One is due tomorrow by 07:00 P.m., so make sure you get that done. Remember, for the lab grading, you need to schedule an interactive grading time with either Matt, My, UTA or myself via calendar. Both of our calendars are open. You can schedule a time anytime. However, please bear in mind that most of the time you have to schedule a meeting at least 2 hours in advance. So donât wait until tomorrow afternoon because we may be all full. And then youâll have to schedule for Thursday so make sure you get that scheduled ASAP. The lab is due before 07:00 P.m. Just to account for some late stuff in case people schedule for after work. Also, donât forget that the Week Two quizzes are due next week. So on September 11 on Monday, make sure you get those done. And then lab Two is going to be due on September 20. Weâre also shooting on having a discussion around that same time as well and Iâll briefly talk about that.
So the discussion sessions have been set for Thursdays from one to 02:00 p.m.. Most weeks those will just be office hours while I will sit in zoom for a while and answer any questions and that may also be there as well. I have sent out speaker invites to get a few speakers from industry to come in and Iâm hoping to schedule our first speaker soon, probably within the next couple of weeks. And so as soon as I get the first few speakers nailed down, I will post that schedule, and then I will update the assignments on canvas, where you can go in and ask a few questions beforehand and then also have the assignment afterwards, where you can get participation credit if youâre not able to attend the live discussion. But for right now, the Thursdays are just office hours, so feel free to drop by anytime if you have any questions on the lab.
So youâre going to start working on lab two. Lab two is basically redoing lab One using Puppet. So what youâre going to do is create two new virtual machines, reinstall the operating system, youâre going to install the Puppet agent and youâre going to make a snapshot. After youâve done all of that, I highly encourage you to reinstall the operating system and run all of the updates for the operating system, it may take several times in both Windows and Linux to get all of the updates. Then install Puppet and then make your snapshot. Itâs really, really important that you remember to make your snapshot at that time before youâve done any other setup so that you can write your Puppet Manifest and test it and then roll it back to that snapshot. Every semester I have somebody do this lab forget to make that snapshot, and then they ask me if thereâs any way to undo it, and I have to tell them, no. You get to reinstall your VMs, so make sure you remember to make that snapshot the Puppet manifest. Youâre just making a manifest file to create users files and do a few other things. Try and keep it very simple. In the videos, I show some ways that you can use Puppet Resource to query your system to see what the setup is currently. So, for example, you could manually add some of those users. Use Puppet Resource to see what that looks like and then trim down that output to create the user accounts that you want.
I do have model solutions for these. The model solutions are less than 200 lines of code per operating system. It is possible to create one unified file that works for both operating systems, but in general, I recommend creating one for Ubuntu and one for Windows. Theyâre going to be similar, but theyâll have some differences, so it makes it a lot easier to keep track. In this lab, you can also use anything from the Puppet Library. There are a couple of times where I show you how to use different library things. If you do use a library from Puppet, make sure you put in comments at the top of your Puppet manifest. What library needs to be installed if you use the Utils Library or Standard Library or the Windows File Permissions Library, anything like that. So make sure you make note of that so that when weâre grading those, we know that we need to install those. And finally, for lab two, the grading for lab two is done offline. So all you have to do is submit your two Puppet Manifest files via Canvas, and then Matt and I will go through and grade those after. The lab is due in a couple of weeks. So you donât have to schedule a grading time for lab two unless you want to. If you want us to go through it manually, we can definitely do that as well. So thatâs really all Iâve got for this week. Itâs a pretty short week.
Hopefully things are going well. As always, if you have any questions in this class, you can keep up with us by joining the discussions on Edstem. You can also join Office hours on Thursdays. Thereâs lots of different ways you can get in touch with both Matt and I. So just let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, I hope things are going well. I know that it kind of feels like you have to do this lab again, but thatâs really the point, is to show you the benefit of doing this manually versus the benefit of doing this in puppet. So hopefully things go well with lab two. Let us know if you have any questions and I will see you again in a couple of weeks.
Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week you should be finishing up lab one. Lab one grading is due tonight by 7pm. So if you havenât scheduled a time to meet with me for grading, make sure you do that ASAP. I do have trainings on Monday afternoons from about one to three, I usually get done with those a little earlier. But itâs worth noting that at least half of my afternoon is taken up by another meeting. So make sure you schedule your schedule your grading times in advance so that you can get those in whenever they work for you. And of course, if you work from eight to five, let me know and Iâll make some time available in my calendar probably after 5pm. So around six or seven to get you taken care of coming up this week, youâve got lab two quizzes, which are due on Friday. And then next week, youâll be turning in lab two and the first discussion which is the week two discussion.
So the discussion for this week is Seth Galitzer. In years past, if you watch the first video, we used to bring in live speakers for this class. Unfortunately, this summer because of low enrollment, and I donât have a ton of time, Iâm reusing the videos from a previous semester. So our first video speaker is Seth Galitzer. Heâs our computer science system administrator. He has been in that role since 2006. He originally has a bachelorâs degree in computer science from K State. And he basically is the person that manages all the Computer Science Systems and labs that we work with all of our research computing. For us as faculty, he helps us purchase and configure our own computer equipment. So Seth has a world of research in system administration and always loves to share his knowledge. So take a look at the video we recorded last year, answer the prompts about it and then come up with a couple of questions youâd like me to pass on to Seth. And then I will take care of passing those on, it might take a little bit for me to get back from him since heâs a little bit busy in the summer. But I will try and get some answers to those questions for you as soon as I can.
So this coming week, youâll be working on lab two, the basic idea of lab two is to redo everything that you did in lab one using the Puppet automation tool to actually make it automated using code instead of doing it by hand. So to get started with lab two, youâre going to reinstall your operating system and a virtual machine install Puppet run all the updates on the operating system. And then very importantly, you need to make a snapshot of your operating system before you start working in Puppet. That way as you write your Puppet manifest file and test you can roll back to that snapshot before you did any Puppet work and use that for testing. Every semester I have one student forget that step where they forget to make a snapshot and then they have to reinstall the operating system and try again, because there is no way to rollback a Puppet manifest once youâve applied it, you need to rollback the snapshot in the virtual machine. The other big hint I can tell you is try and keep it simple. This is not meant to be a very complex lab, most solutions are around 200 lines of code. And for a lot of this, you can simply configure it manually, then use puppet resource
to query the system figure out what that looks like. And then the output of puppet resource
is very similar to what youâll put in your puppet manifest file. Donât just copy paste the whole thing but put just the parts that are important into your manifest file. And it should work just fine.
Thatâs all Iâve got for this week. Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord that youâre welcome to chat with me anytime. Iâm available for tea time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. If you want to come out and talk about just about anything in the world, or just hanging out with people while you continue to work on homework. And then of course you can always use my Calendly link to schedule a one on one office hours with me if you have any questions or concerns about the class. So I know that you might be thinking with lab one, you have to do it again in lab two, but itâs really worth it to see the difference between manually doing all this configuration work and then automating that using a tool like puppet. I hope you really start to see the value of automation and System Administration. Thatâs one of the big things we push for. As always, if you have any questions, let me know otherwise, good luck, and I will see you next week.
Hello and welcome to the week five announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. This week we got a lot of stuff going on. Weâve got lab two thatâs due on Wednesday, so tomorrow you should be getting done with lab two. Thereâs also the first discussion will be this Thursday, so the questions for our speaker for the first discussion are also due on Wednesday, so make sure you get those posted. Then we go into next Monday. Youâve got lab three quizzes due or due next Monday. Next Wednesday the discussion one responses due if youâre not able to attend a live discussion and then two weeks from now lab three is due and the second discussion questions will be due because our second speaker will be that week. So thereâs stuff due every week, sometimes on Monday and Wednesday, so make sure youâre watching your calendar. Hopefully things go really smoothly, but itâs a really good time to keep keeping on your Canvas calendar to make sure you donât miss anything that is due coming up.
So for lab two grading, all you have to do is submit your puppet manifest files on Canvas. Thereâs no meeting required, so you donât have to schedule time with Matt or I. What will happen is Matt will download your files as heâs going through and grading them. Heâll run them on his VM. Basically what heâll do is heâll start at a snapshot thatâs just what you should have for your assignment. Heâll run your manifest file, reboot, run your manifest file again, and then check to make sure it did everything correctly. We have to do the reboot so that all of your group permissions get applied properly, and itâs also a way to check to make sure that on Windows it doesnât keep reinstalling some of the system, some of like Firefox and Thunderbird. It shouldnât reinstall those. It should just see that theyâre installed every time. So lab two grading, you donât need to meet with anybody. Probably what Iâll do is on Thursday, anybody thatâs already submitted lab two, I will go through and give you one point on that lab that will unlock the model solutions and also unlock access so you can get started on lab three because you want to go through that pretty quickly.
So our speaker for this coming week is Kyle Hudson. Kyle Hudson works at Kanren, which is the Internet Service Provider for K -State and other research. institutions in the state of Kansas. Kyle was formerly one of the folks that worked with Beocat. So heâs worked with us a lot. Heâs spoken in the class before about his Beocat experience. But now Iâm really excited to hear about his new job working at Kanren. Kyle will be here speaking Thursday at 1pm via Zoom in our usual Zoom meeting time. So remember to get points for the discussion, you have two options. You can either attend live and ask at least one question of the speaker or you can watch it either live or recorded and then youâll be able to write a quick response. Iâll post the response prompt shortly after the speaker. So youâll be able to work on that. And remember thatâs Thursday at 1pm. Your questions are due Wednesday night.
So youâll be going into Lab 3. Lab 3 in this class goes over core networking services. So weâre gonna set up our own little network in VMware. Weâre gonna set our IP addresses. Weâre gonna install a DNS and DHCP server and configure those. Weâre going to an install an SNMP server and learn how to work with that. Weâre gonna use tools like Wireshark to explore some network packets. Lots of stuff are going on in Lab 3. Lab 3 is probably the second hardest lab in this class. Itâs a lot of new content if youâve never worked with networking stuff before. In the textbook, there are some hints and some diagrams. So make sure you take a look at those. I show some pretty good examples of how to do debugging on DNS, for example. And of course, if nothing else, if youâre stuck, please ask questions. This is one of those labs you should start on very, very early and start working on a little bit at a time. Try and do one service at a time. So get DNS working, then get DHCP working, then get SNMP working. Make snapshots in VMware, snapshots are your friend. But if you get stuck, donât be afraid to ask questions. Schedule a meeting, come to office hours. Weâre happy to help. So thatâs really it. Other than that, you can keep in touch either by posting on ed discussion or emailing us or joining the discussions Thursday at one o âclock.
After Kyleâs done, Iâll stick around and answer any questions if you have any. You can always schedule a one -on -one office hours with either myself or Matt using our Calendly links. Weâre always here to help. So hopefully things are going well. Hopefully youâre able to get up and networking this week. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, best of luck and I look forward to seeing you at the discussion on Thursday.
Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week you should be wrapping up lab two, which is due tonight at 7pm. Iâll talk about that briefly in just a second. You also should be working on the week two discussion questions and responses which are due tonight at 11:59pm. So make sure you leave enough time to watch that video, write your responses and respond to the question prompts there as well. This Friday, youâll have the week three quizzes that are due and then next Monday, youâll be turning in lab three, and also doing the week three discussion.
So for lab two grading, you should be working on that today, all you have to do is submit your puppet manifest files to Canvas. So you should have a windows.pp and the linux.pp. Sometimes people have built them as single files, thatâs fine. If thereâs any libraries or modules I need to install in puppet to make your files work, just put those in the comments at the top of your file. But really, all you should have to do is submit your to manifest files for lab two. And then what I will do for grading is I will download them, I will run them on my system, I will reboot my system, I will run them again, just like I discussed in the lab. That way you donât have to worry if some of your group memberships donât take the first time I run it, I reboot it, I run it again. And then Iâll go through and check to see if your file did all of the configuration that itâs supposed to do. Hopefully it does. If you have any questions or concerns on lab two, Iâm available, you do not need to schedule a meeting with me to discuss lab two. Iâll just create it on canvas. But if you have any questions or want to discuss lab two, Iâm totally open for meetings today. Just let me know.
So your speaker for this week is Dr. Gary Pratt. He was the K-State CIO and has been in that role since 2017. Probably his biggest claim to fame at K-State among other things is he was hired about a month before the Hale Library fire that took down all of our systems. For those of you that are unaware, in 2017. In about May, we had a fire in Hale Library that didnât do a ton of damage to the library itself. But as part of putting out the fire, there was a lot of water in smoke damage. And the water actually filtered down into the data center that is in the basement of Hale Library where a significant amount of K-Stateâss IT systems were kept. And so that created a lot of issues where many central IT systems down were down for several weeks, I think cases was brought back online the day before enrollment was supposed to start in June. So it was a really big deal. He talks a little bit about that in his video as well. But the bigger picture as a CIO, he oversees all of K-Stateâs IT and heâs really in charge of the big picture and long range planning that goes on at K State. He does have an education background. So he loves teaching. He loves talking to students. Just like Seth last week, Dr. Pratt is also more than willing to answer questions from this class. So if you submit any questions as part of your responses, I will collect those and for those on the Dr. Pratt and hopefully get a response from him sometime later this summer.
So this week, you should be working on lab three, lab three is where weâre going to pivot and start working on a lot of networking. So weâll study core network services, weâll talk about setting IP addresses in our systems, weâre going to install a DNS and a DHCP server in Linux, weâll also install an SNMP, server in Linux. And weâll do some playing around with Wireshark to capture some network packets and see what that looks like. lab three becomes much more complex than lab two, depending on your background and networking. I understand for many of you, this might be the first time youâve worked with a lot of these technologies. And so it can be very complicated. Youâll be reading a lot of documentation and trying to figure out how those things work. Just like with lab two, my best advice is to make snapshots often whenever you get something to work. And if something does not work like you expect it, feel free to roll back to that snapshot and try again, specifically SNMP, I do have some notes in there, the DigitalOcean documentation works up to a certain point, but it does not give the correct instructions for how to set a password for a new user account. So thereâs a second set of instructions that you want to follow for that particular step of setting up SNMP. It does totally work. But you may have to play around a little bit to see which process actually works for you. Thankfully, at the end of lab three, there are some hints and network diagrams that you can look at. Thereâs a great video on how to debug a DNS server using dig so you can check that out. So make sure you watch all of the content at the end of lab three before you ask questions. It really will help you understand what weâre trying to do and how to debug it. But if you get stuck, donât be afraid to ask questions. Iâm more than happy to help with this.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord. If you have any questions, you can join us for tea time office hours on Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. If you want to chat about anything going on, I also have one on one office hours available via the Calendly link that you use for scheduling grading. So feel free to use that. And you can always send me an email and Iâll be happy to answer your questions there. So other than that, thatâs where weâre going this week youâre going to start working with networking. Itâs a big step in towards system administration. Next week after this weâre going to be working on LDAP and active directory so youâll have a our core authentication services setup and then week five we pivot over into the cloud but this is the week that start setting up the real system administration part where we get networking working as always if you have any questions let me know otherwise good luck this week and I will talk to you next week
Hello and welcome to the week eight announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. So this week you should be wrapping up the second discussion. We had Adam come in and talk about his work on Beocat. So hopefully youâre getting a response put together for that. Also due tomorrow are the quizzes for Lab 4, so hopefully youâre getting those done. And then next week by Wednesday Lab 4 is due, so hopefully youâre able to get started working on that. So some quick hints real quick about success in this course because I get asked this question every once in a while. Things that you can do to be really successful in this course is to read the lab assignments very, very carefully. Thereâs a lot of information in there, but thereâs also a lot of hints in there about ways to do things or pitfalls weâve run into. Those red and green and blue boxes are things that Iâve added in over the years that I think are very helpful. The linked documentation is also very helpful. A lot of times the work youâre trying to do in the lab can be accomplished by following that first or second documentation link and following the steps there. I try and post them in the order of relevance, so most likely start with the first one. It will probably answer most of your questions. But if you do get stuck in this class, if youâre not making forward progress after about an hour or if something breaks and you canât figure it out, that is a great time to take a stop and ask questions. Thereâs a lot of things both Matt and I know how to help you with that itâs just impossible for us to explain in the class. For example, things like how to check your system log, how to restart services and look for bugs and how to look at these config files and see whatâs going on. Especially with Lab 4, you have to be diagnosing network issues and also looking at domain issues and trying to get your certificates to work. Thereâs a lot of intricacy in Lab 4. If you get stuck, donât spin your wheels. Please come talk to us. Weâve got a lot of time. Matt will be having office hours on Thursday during the one o âclock time. I should be there as well for a little while. Hopefully, you can use some of these tips to be successful in this course.
For Lab 4, weâre going to start working on authentication. For Lab 4, youâre going to be working on authentication. to create a new virtual machine using Windows Server. Windows Server is kind of a fat VM, so beware. It does require a lot of RAM and quite a bit of storage space, so hopefully that works out for you. What youâre going to do in Windows Server is youâre going to create an Active Directory domain, which is the default standard for what most systems use for this. K -State CS, even though weâre a Linux system, actually uses Active Directory as K -State does as well. On the Linux side, youâre going to create an open LDAP server, which is kind of the Linux open source equivalent of this. And then for each one, youâre going to configure a client that connects to those systems. And youâre also going to configure a little of interoperability, where you have an Ubuntu client that logs in using an Active Directory domain on Windows. As before, the biggest thing I can tell you in this lab is to make snapshots. Some of the times that are really useful to make snapshots are on your Windows Server before you promote it to an Active Directory domain controller. That process fails maybe one out of 20 times. And so every semester, thereâs at least one student where that process fails. Just go back to your snapshot and try again. Same thing with OpenLDAP, the process that usually fails is adding the TLS certificate to the LDAP server. So make a snapshot before you start that process. Thankfully, the process is mostly just following the instructions and mimicking the commands from the guide. But if you screw something up, itâs much easier to roll back and try again, then to try and figure out what happened and debug it and undo it. So use the snapshots very wisely as much as you can in Lab 4.
Once you get done with Lab 4, youâre welcome to push right ahead and go to Lab 5. Lab 5, weâre going to shift gears and weâre going to work in the Cloud for this lab. So youâre going to create a couple of Cloud resources. In most cases, these will be droplets on DigitalOcean. You can use other Cloud providers if you would like. I have had a couple of students do these labs on AWS. I havenât had anybody try to do them on Azure yet. I really recommend DigitalOcean. Itâs the system Iâm familiar with and so for debugging and things, itâs the one that Iâd be most able to help you with. So you create a couple of Cloud resources, youâre configure SSH in your firewall, set up some virtual hosts in Apache, and then weâre also going to start working with Docker. And so weâre going to set up a couple of Docker containers with reverse proxy so that you can see what that looks like as well. Itâs really, really fun. So as always, feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord. Weâve got the ed discussion board that you can chat with. You can schedule one -on -one office hours. Weâve got our usual office hour on Thursday. Iâm working on trying to schedule a couple more guest speakers. Itâs just got to try and work in their schedule, but Iâm going to try and get Seth Galitzer if I can. Iâll try and get somebody from K -State Central IT if I can, and Iâm going to try and get somebody from industry. So Iâll be reaching out and making some of those connections and trying to schedule those over the next few weeks.
Quick punch in here because I forgot to record this slide earlier. I have a couple of days of upcoming travel coming up this week. I will be out of the office most of Thursday through Sunday this week and also Thursday through Sunday of next week. Because of that, my response is maybe a little bit delayed and if you need any grading done by me, it may be a little delayed as well. Match should be available, so youâre more than welcome to schedule with him during those times. times. If you need any help, please donât email me directly. Make sure you email the CIS 527 Help email address or post on ed discussion. That message goes to both myself and to Matt. So Matt will be able to jump in and help you out with things. But just making you aware that Iâve got some upcoming travel, which means Iâll be gone Thursday through Sunday the next couple weeks. So if you email me or try and contact me on either Thursday or Friday of those weeks, it might be Monday or Tuesday of the following week before I came back to you. So just bear that in mind. Iâve got a couple of days where Iâm going to be gone. So hopefully that doesnât cause any concerns. And if you need anything during those times, Matt should be able to help you out as well.
So itâs week eight. Weâre finally at the halfway mark of the semester. Hopefully things are going well and youâre rolling into lab four with a lot of confidence. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know or talk to Matt. Heâs also really more than capable of helping you out. So best of luck on lab four. Lab four is probably one of the more difficult labs in this class. So I hope it goes well. But as always if you have any questions let us know and I will see you again in a couple weeks
Hello, and welcome to the week for announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. This week, you should be working on lab three, which is due today by 7pm. So make sure you getting that wrapped up and also that you have a time scheduled with me to get your grading done. Iâll talk about that in just a minute. Youâre also should be working on the week three discussion, which is due tonight by 11:59pm. So make sure you watch the video, write some responses and also provide some new questions for our guests. This week, youâre working on week four. So we four quizzes are due Friday. And then the next lab which is lab four is due next Tuesday. Weâre postponing it today to to the holiday on Monday, the July 4. So there is a lab thatâs due next Tuesday, youâll need to schedule a time with me to get that graded. But there is no discussion this week, weâre pushing off the discussion until week five. So you donât have to worry about a discussion this week, just focusing on lab four.
So for lab three grading, you should have done a lot of different things revolving around core networking in this lab. So the things Iâm going to be looking for in a grade is the remote connections. So making sure you can use remote desktop into your Windows system and using SSH into your Linux system. You should also have set a static IP on your Ubuntu Server VM. And then on that server, weâre going to check your DNS settings your DNS lookups, weâre going to check DHCP. And Iâm also going to look at SNMP and Wireshark. Hopefully, you can do the live demo of SNMP. But a lot of times, it doesnât always work the way you want it to. So Iâm hoping that you follow the labs and took screenshots so that I can look through everything. Same thing with Wireshark, you should have screenshots for a bunch of things in Wireshark, to show that youâre able to find those individual packets and find the data that weâre looking for. As always, if you have any questions about this, let me know you can talk to me and ask questions before grading starts. But as soon as we start grading, you canât change anything. So if you realize you missed something or something is incorrect. Once we start grading, itâs too late, I have to take it as itâs submitted. So if you have any questions on lab three, please let me know.
Some tips for success on lab three, this is one of the first more difficult labs in this class. So I really encourage you have to take some time, read the lab very carefully and make sure that you understand what it is asking you to do. This lab in the next lab I give quite a lot of information on so it should be pretty easy to implement it as itâs written. But you do have to read carefully and make sure you understand what Iâm asking for. You may also have to spend some time reading various bits of documentation to understand how to do what Iâm asking you to do. But thankfully for a lot of this, Iâve provided some tutorials that you can pretty much walk through and adapt a little bit to your environment to make sure it works. Make sure you check out the posted hints, especially at the end of lab three, there are a couple of extra pages on how to do debugging with DNS, what your network diagram should look like things like that. Make sure you use the resources linked in this lab, especially in the lab itself. Thereâs a lot of resources that are what I use when I have to do these things. So make sure you take advantage of those. Like I said, donât be afraid to ask me questions. And finally, the big thing with this lab is donât spin your wheels. If you feel like youâre getting stuck, if itâs taking you a long time to solve something. Take a minute slow down, ask me questions. Generally, if youâve spent more than about an hour trying to solve something, getting it to work, and it doesnât seem to work, thatâs a good chance to take a step back and ask for help. It is entirely possible for you to run into issues that you cannot solve in this lab. Sometimes students will bring to me issues that I cannot solve. And so if I canât fix it, itâs not worth spending any of your time trying to fix it as well. So donât spend your wheels ask for help if you get stuck.
So our speaker coming up is Kyle Hutson, this is actually the week five speaker that youâll be looking at, but Iâm going to briefly talk about him now. Kyle Hutson is one of the Beocat admins at K-State and manages K-Stateâs supercomputer. If youâve been an engineering building, youâve probably seen it right outside the computer science classrooms. He has a lot of experience working on powerful hardware and large multi cluster systems. He does a lot of talking about working in the cloud versus working on premises. So he brings a really unique look at how we do this. He also does a lot with scientific computing. And so scientific computing is a different realm to work in than most industrial computing setups because you really want to maximize your CPU capabilities there. So Kyle is going to talk all about Beocat, youâll get to watch that. And that is due in week five.
So coming up after this week, the next lab is lab four, where youâre going to be working on Active Directory and LDAP. Basically doing authentication against the server. So youâll set up a Windows Server VM, youâll configure it for Active Directory, youâll add your Windows client so that so it uses the Active Directory to log in. Youâll also add one of your Ubuntu clients to that so that logs into Active Directory. And then likewise on your Ubuntu server, youâll set up an open LDAP server and configure your one of your Ubuntu clients to log in via open LDAP. So itâs kind of complex, but it sets some of the groundwork for a lot of other things that you can do in system administration. It really mimics what we actually have set up in the computer science department where we have an Active Directory server that everything logs in against. Biggest hints for lab four - take the time and make snapshots, especially, I encourage you to make a snapshot of your Windows Server VM before you try and install Active Directory. The Active Directory install process is notorious for failing every once in a while. And so if you can roll back to that snapshot and try it again, it will make your life a lot easier. So take snapshots anytime you get something working, or before you start something so that you can roll back. The same goes for open LDAP. When you configure TLS, for open LDAP, it is a very fraught process, it even takes me a couple of tries to get it right. So make snapshots with open LDAP before you start trying to do the TLS process. So you can roll back to that snapshot if it doesnât work.
So after lab four, we have lab five, lab five has a lot of new content in it this year. So weâll have to see how it goes. In lab five, weâre going to configure a couple of cloud resources, weâll set up SSH, configs, and firewalls. And then the two big new things this year is weâre going to add Docker to our cloud resources. And weâre going to set up some Docker containers and a Docker reverse proxy. So those are some new things weâre going to look at this year. Iâm open to feedback. So if you have any questions or concerns about the new content around Docker, please let me know so we can improve that and make that better for the future.
Other than that, donât be afraid to keep in touch. Weâve got discussion times on Discord. Weâve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. Youâre always welcome to join and hang out anytime that weâre on Tea Time. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me, you can shoot me an email if you have questions. Thereâs lots of ways that you can get help. So donât be afraid to take advantage of that. Other than that, hopefully this week and next week are not too frustrating, but I will be open with you. lab three and lab four are probably the most difficult and frustrating labs in this class. Especially if youâve never worked with this technology before. It really can be painful to get it working the first time so donât let it get to you take some time. Take some breaks, ask questions if you get stuck. And as always, I wish you the best of luck and happy Fourth of July and I will talk to you next Tuesday.
Hello and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2023. This week Lab 4 is due tomorrow, so make sure youâre getting Lab 4 all wrapped up. Then you should also be starting on the content for Lab 5, which is some introduction to the cloud. And then a couple weeks from now youâll have the Lab 5 content thatâs actually due, so you should get started on Lab 5 sometime next week. So for grading on Lab 4, basically we want to see a few simple things. We want to see your Windows Server up and running with an Active Directory installed and a static IP address. We want to see that youâve created a user and group and Active Directory, and we want to show that youâve connected a Windows client to that Active Directory. Then weâll shift over to Linux. We want to see that youâve installed Open LDAP and youâve created a user and group using LDAP Account Manager. I posted an announcements video yesterday with a video showing you how to install LDAP Account Manager, so hopefully that helps. I apologize for the bad audio quality on that video. It was recorded on my laptop, which doesnât have a good microphone. I will re -record a more professional version of that video in the future. And then we want to see you have an Ubuntu client that logs into LDAP using the LDAP client. We also want to have an Ubuntu that logs into your Active Directory. Those could be two different VMs, two different snapshots of the same VM. Itâs up to you how you want to handle that. But thatâs really all we want to see with Lab 4. If everythingâs working, it takes very little time to show us that itâs working. If you have trouble, feel free to work with Matt or I, and weâd be happy to help you debug it. Weâre slowly getting better with debugging problems with Lab 4.
So some quick reminders to be successful in this class. Make sure you read the assignments very carefully. Take a look at any posted diagrams or resources that I have. A lot of those resources have good steps, tutorials. Generally, I try and post them in the order of usefulness. So typically the top one that I post is the one that youâre most interested in on the assignments. But if youâre stuck, donât be afraid to ask questions. Donât be afraid to come to office hours. The big thing is donât spin your wheels. Donât feel like you just keep working in a rut. If youâve been working on something, just keep working on it. for half hour and canât figure it out. Come talk to us, let us know. Weâve got some pretty good background in debugging and can do a lot to help you figure out whatâs going on. So feel free to reach out.
So this week you should be moving on to Lab 5. Lab 5, weâre going to shift over to doing some stuff in the cloud for Lab. We wonât use the VMs for this lab, but youâll still need them for Lab 6 and 7, so hold onto those. If youâre running out of storage space, let me know or let Matt know. Weâve got some tips we can give you to help resolve some of that. Basically what youâre going to do is set up two droplets on DigitalOceanâs cloud infrastructure. If you have experience with AWS and Azure, youâre welcome to work there. I donât have a lot of experience with that or debugging anything there, so I really recommend DigitalOcean if possible, but youâre welcome to do something else. Just understand if it breaks, I may not be able to help you fix it and I may ask you to move to DigitalOcean. Youâre going to set up an SSH in firewall, youâre going to configure the Apache web server and some simple websites on Apache. Youâll set up a working DNS name, and then weâre going to do a little bit with⌠Docker and youâll set up a Docker reverse proxy to two different Docker containers just to get a little bit of experience working with Docker in lab five So one thing you can do is if you donât have any access to digital ocean yet You can either register for the github education pack at this URL You can also go to try that digital ocean comm slash free trial offer. I apologize that got cut off Usually digital ocean has an offer where you can get anywhere from 100 to 200 dollars in free credit with a new account Same thing for name cheap dot me you can get a dot me domain for 99 cents If you need credits on digital ocean, let me know Iâve got referral credits. I can give you as well Overall for this class the total cost you should spend on this is about 11 dollars. Itâs pretty cheap I think itâs itâs reasonable to do this on your own But most of these you can get for free or for 99 cents So hopefully it works should work out but at most you should pay no more than 11 dollars to complete some of this stuff
So finally a quick reminder, Iâve got some upcoming travel this week Iâll be out of the office Thursday through Sunday of this week because that responses be email and grading may be a bit delayed Matt is still available so you can reach out to Matt anytime if you have questions Please make sure you use the CIS 527 help email address thatâs on the canvas page or post an ed discussion Those go to both Matt and I so we can help you out there Finally, of course, thereâs opportunities to keep in touch. We have a discussion on discord. We have ed discussion boards We have time for one -on -one office hours Matt should be at the Thursday office hour time as well if youâd like to meet within there Iâm working on scheduling the next discussions. Unfortunately. Iâve had to reschedule a couple of things So Iâll be working on that soon Weâll try and have at least two more discussions this semester My goal is to have three more but weâll see if we can fit that all into the schedule But those will be getting posted very shortly as well So weâre getting up to the cloud It always reminds you of this great XKCD comic where the cloud is just somebody elseâs computer I think this really describes it quite well. So if you havenât seen this comic take a look at this XKCD comic I hope everything goes well with lab 5 if you have any questions, let us know and I will talk to you again in a couple weeks Good luck
Hello, and welcome to the week five Announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week, you should be wrapping up lab four, which is notoriously the hardest lab in this class, it is due today by 7pm. So make sure you get that done and schedule a grading time with me later today. So we can get that looked at. And then next week, youâre going to be shifting over to lab five, where weâre going to pivot from virtual machines on our system to actually working in the cloud. So Friday of the week, five quizzes are due and the next Monday, youâll be turning in lab five, as well as the week five discussion.
So for lab four grading, itâs actually pretty simple. Thereâs not a whole lot that I need to see. But thereâs a lot of stuff behind the scenes that need to work correctly. In order for this to work. Basically in lab for grading, Iâm going to check your Windows Server, make sure itâs up and running, going to check your Windows Active Directory User and Group to see that youâre actually able to create your user. And then I want to see you actually log into the active directory using Windows. Likewise on Ubuntu, I want to see your open LDAP server working and actually see a user and group in PHP LDAP admin. And then I want to see your Ubuntu be able to log into LDAP. And then either that same VM on a different snapshot or a different VM log into Active Directory either way. So really, it takes only about five minutes to grade this if all your VMs are up and running. But it is a lot of complexity behind the scenes to get all that to work.
So again, just like last week to be successful, make sure you read things carefully. Make sure you look at the posted diagrams and the exercises, use the resources you have available to you I try and link some really good guidance for how to do this. But the big thing is, donât be afraid to ask questions. If youâre spinning your wheels. If you get stuck and youâre not making progress for about an hour, feel free to ask questions. Iâm available on Discord, you can email me you can join us for office hours, anytime that you want. Just let me know how I can help.
So this weekâs Speaker I mentioned him last week is Kyle Hutson, one of the Beocat admins and K-State, he helps manage key state supercomputer that you probably seen in the engineering building right next to the computer science classrooms. He has a lot of experience working with very powerful hardware with very large on premises setups. And he talks a little bit about the difference between K-State hosting its own supercomputer versus using resources in the cloud, such as AWS, and why we would do something like that. And he also talks a little bit about scientific computing and how it differs from the general computing that you might work with at an industry itself.
So this week, youâre going to be working in lab five, where weâre going to move everything to the cloud. So the big thing with lab five is youâre going to create two droplets on Digital Ocean, which are two virtual servers that work up in the cloud, youâre going to set up SSH and a firewall on those so that you can connect to them remotely, youâre going to set up simple Apache sites on each one with a virtual hosts so that you can access websites on each one, youâll also need to set up a DNS domain name and actually point those DNS names at those servers so that you can access them directly there. And youâll also set up a Docker reverse proxy following the instructions in some of the new Docker videos this year. So lab five is kind of introducing all the cloud concepts. And then lab six and seven, we iterate on that a little bit more.
So a couple of things that you want to check out are the GitHub education pack, which is education github.com, it looks like this got cut off. But you can find DigitalOcean credits by going to try to digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer that will give you up to $100, credit and DigitalOcean. If you have a new account, if you go to nc.me, you can get a free .me domain for one year using your .edu email address when you sign up. If you have trouble getting access to either of those, please feel free to ask me, Iâve got referral credits, I can send you the free trial links, thereâs lots of codes that you can use. So ideally, you shouldnât have to pay anything for this, if youâve never set up accounts on these services before. If you have set up accounts on these services at most, you may have to pay about 11 dollars to do this. So let me know, if you have any trouble getting this to work, Iâm happy to share some referral credits or help you out in any way possible. But those are the two things youâll need to sign up for in order to start working in the cloud.
So thatâs all I got this week. As always, we have good discussions on this court. So you can always join me there, you can join me for tea time office hours, Tuesdays at 330. And Fridays at 1030. Weâre always online in zoom for about an hour, you can schedule a one on one office hour with me using my Calendly link, you can always send me an email as well, Iâm always happy to help. And remember the big thing in this class is anytime you get stuck, or you feel like youâre spinning your wheels, thatâs a good time to take a step back and ask for help. Instead of trying to power forward, there are certain situations you can get into in this class where itâs very hard to make a forward progress. And so donât be afraid to ask me questions. And I can help you either reset or restart or adjust things so that you can get it to work. So thatâs what weâve got going on. I really like this XKCD comic here where it talks about the cloud. I in my lecture, I talked a little bit about the cloud that itâs really just from a point of view, itâs really somebody elseâs computer. And so you or I might think of as cloud is actually somebody elseâs computer. So itâs really important to think about the cloud that way itâs kind of a good framing Advice to use for the cloud and so Iâd like to end on this XKCD comic for the slideshow so as always if you have any questions let me know otherwise Best of luck working on lab five this week and I will see you next week
Hello, and welcome to the week six Announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week, you should be wrapping up lab five, which is due today at 7pm. So make sure you get that done. Most of lab grading is really simple. And weâll talk about that in just a minute. You should also be wrapping up the week five discussion, which is also due tonight by midnight, so make sure you get that done. This week, youâll be working on Week Six content. So the week six quizzes are due Friday. And then lab six and the week six discussions are due next Monday.
So for lab five grading today, the biggest thing Iâm going to check is that you can SSH from your system to the front end. And that I can also use the grating SSH key to get into your front end. And then that we can SSH from your front end to your back end. Weâll also do things like checking the firewall, the date and time configuration, weâre going to check Apache DNS and make sure that HTTPS is working. So Apache is running on your back end. And then on your front end, you should have Docker with Docker reverse proxy setup. And so we should have three different websites we can access one on the back end using Apache and then two on the front end in Docker using some sort of reverse proxy, they should all be set up so that we can access them. So hopefully youâve got all that working for lab five. If youâre having trouble, feel free to schedule a time with me, and Iâd be happy to meet with you and get that checked out.
So the speaker that youâre going to look at this week is Sarah Allen. Sarah Allen is a system administrator from McCown-Gordon and a former CIS 527 student whoâs now working in industry in System Administration. Her background is mainly in Help Desk and Frontline support for a large construction company. And so because of that, she deals with some unique challenges that a lot of other companies may not face. And her expertise is really interesting in that particular area of the field. So look forward to checking that video out of Sarah. And then of course, sheâll respond to a few prompts and ask a few questions of Sarah, at the end of that.
So this coming week, youâre going to work on lab six, I donât have that posted right now. But I should have that posted by the end of today. Um, lab six is mainly focused on doing things around file servers, and drive mappings on Windows and Linux, weâre also going to look a little bit at application servers and web servers. And by the end of lab six, youâll have a couple of working web apps. The plan is for lab six, youâll do the windows stuff in your VMs. And youâll also do the file server stuff and your VMs for Linux. And then in the cloud, youâre going to actually deploy some sort of a web app to Docker, I believe weâre going to do WordPress, but I need to look into that a little bit to make sure that that works the way I want it to before I actually post that lab.
Also, weâre getting toward the end of the semester. So nowâs the time to start thinking of your final project. The goal for the final project is to build something new or fix something related to system administration. So you can think about systems you interact with on a daily basis that youâd like to change or something that you think you might want to build that has a system and registration component to it. Some things you could think of would be setting up a web resource for new startups. So how would you deploy their website? How would you host that? How would you maintain that? Automatically setting up a bunch of new laptops for school, designing some sort of central authentication and networking system for accompany discussing the differences between using thin clients and thick clients in a computer slab? The choice of antivirus clients the choice of using Chromebooks for web development. Thereâs lots of things that you can look at related to system administration. If youâre not sure you can chat with me for ideas. The biggest thing for this final project is to come up with something, propose it and then do a SWOT analysis of your proposal. And so Iâm really curious about the SWOT analysis more than anything, where you look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I will admit, in years past, most students have spent a lot of time on the design of the final projects, and then not a lot of time on the SWOT analysis. But the SWOT analysis is really more of the points of your final project. So make sure you leave plenty of time to do a deep analysis on it. And really try and present to me the pros and cons and show that youâve thought through this very quickly.
Donât forget, if you need it, you can get the GitHub education pack, you can go to try digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer or go to nc.me to get access to DigitalOcean Name Cheap for super cheap, if not free. I also have some credits and both of those so if you need any help getting any of the resources for this class, just let me know.
Otherwise, feel free to keep in touch. I still have discussions on Discord I host tea time every Tuesday at 330 and Friday 1030 Itâs a great time to just hang out and chat while you work on stuff. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me using my Calendly link thatâs in my email signature in the syllabus. Iâm always available, so donât be afraid to ask me questions. Other than that weâre getting near the end. Weâre on Week Six of eight. So just two more weeks to go. Make sure you keep up on the labs make sure you start thinking about your final project. If you have any questions, let me know otherwise. I look forward to seeing you again next week.
Hello, and welcome to the week seven announcements video for CIS 527 In summer 2022. So weâre getting toward the end of the semester. So this week, donât forget you got lab six due tonight by 7pm. So make sure you get that submitted, Iâve got most grading times available for students. But if you need more help or needed writing time, just let me know. Itâs also available on Calendly. Like always, thereâs a week six discussion thatâs due tonight by 1159. So make sure you watch the video, respond to it and post some questions for our guest speaker. This week on Friday, youâve got the week, seven quizzes that are due. And you also have your final project proposal thatâs due, weâll talk a little bit about the final project and the second. And then next Monday, lab seven, the last seven, the last lab in this class is due. And thereâs also one more discussion that is due next Monday as well. I will be posting lab seven, hopefully later today. So you can get started on that.
So for lab six grading, weâre really looking at four things, you should have a Windows File Server setup with the Group Policy, so that automatically mounts those network drives via Active Directory, you should have an Ubuntu file server setup with some work in fs tab and some other files to actually get the files to mount correctly, you should have a Windows web application running in IIS on your Windows Server. And then you should have a cloud web application running either directly on your back end and front end droplets or running it through Docker. Those are the things weâre going to be looking for. For lab six. The nice thing is if it works, it takes all of five minutes to grade it. If it doesnât work, weâll try and dig into it a little bit and figure out exactly whatâs going on. So that hopefully we can get it fixed. So lab seven is kind of a grab bag of all these other topics that I really want to cover in this class, but they donât fit nicely into a single lab. So weâll spend some time talking about backups and restore. And weâll have you do a practice Backup and Restore on an Active Directory server will talk a bit about monitoring and give you a chance to set up some monitoring systems on your droplets on the web. Weâll also talk a bit about DevOps and weâll play around with web hooks and a few things like that. So thatâs really what weâre doing in lab seven.
The speaker for this week is Hunter Guthrie. Hunter Guthrie is a plant system administrator for Evergy, specifically at the Wolf Creek generating plant. Heâs a former student of mine in this class. And heâs really unique because he works in a very highly secure industry working at a nuclear power plants. So you know, Sarah had her own concerns and things working in a construction industry where itâs much more about usability and working out in the field. Hunter is kind of the other side of that where he works in a very highly secure industry. So everything has to be very carefully vetted and protected. And so he works on kind of an entirely different setup than what Sarah has. And itâs really interesting to see those two different sides of the IT coin.
So you should be starting to think about your final project. The proposal is due this Friday. The goal of the final project is to demonstrate what youâve learned in this class by proposing to either build something or fix something or change something related to it and System Administration. Some ideas that you can think of would be designing a web resource for new startups. So how would you host their website? How would you ensure high availability? How would you deal with high traffic loads? Looking at things like scalability and the design of that system? You can think about setting up laptops for a school if a school gets a donation of 50 laptops or 100 laptops? How could you use tools like puppet or chef or Ansible to set up and manage those laptops, you could think about central authentication. If youâve got a small company thatâs growing, how could you help them build out a central authentication system using a Windows Server and Active Directory and getting all the clients connected, maybe looking at things like VPNs, so that you can have multiple offices connected together on the same network or, you know, today thinking about work from home and how people can securely access work resources from home. You can also discuss things like thin clients versus thick clients, specifically in a lab setting. So you know, here in K-State, we have a couple of computer labs that have thin clients that just remote desktop into a server. We also have some labs with thick clients or traditional desktops. And so thereâs pros and cons on that, and thatâd be really good. The bottom line was this final project, hopefully, youâve got an idea in mind. If not, feel free to chat with me, Iâm happy to kind of dig into things youâre interested in and try and pitch you an idea of something that I think would be a really useful final project.
So the final project itself, it really has a few different deliverables. The first big thing is youâll need to have a written report, I highly recommend using the template that I pointed out in the final project. Be aware of the template each paragraph is listed as bullet points. Your report should not be bullet points. The bullet points are simply saying what sorts of paragraphs what sorts of ideas you should address in those sections. So do not submit a report full of bullet points. It should be a written report with paragraphs. In the written report, youâre going to spend some time researching, proposing and doing a SWOT analysis of your project. You can include graphics and data, anything thatâs needed to help me understand your proposal and your SWOT analysis. The big thing to focus on is the SWOT analysis. You need to do enough work on your proposal so that itâs understandable that youâve proposed it We understand the parameters that youâre using. But you really should focus a bit on the SWOT analysis. A lot of students usually tend to make the SWOT analysis at the last minute. And because of that, they really havenât taken enough time to analyze specifically the weaknesses and the threats related to their project, I really donât want to see a SWOT analysis that says that any proposal has no weaknesses or no threats, thatâs simply not the case, you just have to think a little bit bigger, be a little bit more malicious towards your project so that you can come up with those weaknesses and threats. Once youâve got all that done, youâre going to schedule a live presentation where you will present your written report to me, in usually the presentation is about 15 to 30 minutes, a lot of times it covers about the same structure and content is the written report. The goal of this live presentation is to convince me that you have analyzed your proposal Well, a good way to think of this is I am your CIO, you are working for me, and youâre proposing this as a new technology project press to undertake. So you should convince me as your CIO, that this is a good idea that youâve done your analysis that youâve done your research, and that we can proceed with this. So your presentation is about 15 to 30 minutes, you can present any style you want. If you want to use PowerPoint, if you just want to scroll through your report, if you want to do something different, that is fine. The last part of your final project is a small prototype, I want you to take one small part of what youâre proposing and build a small prototype of it. The prototype should be a minor portion of this, maybe spend about two to four hours on it. But things like if youâre doing the laptop setup for a school, maybe play around with Ansible and compare it to puppet a little bit. If youâre doing a single sign on for a company look at maybe building another Active Directory server and connecting up some different clients in different ways. If youâre building a website for high availability, maybe spin up a couple more droplets on DigitalOcean and play around with things like their load balancers or their automatic scalability. Again, the prototype should be a small part of your project, maybe spend no more than two or four hours on the prototype. But it really wants you to build at least a small portion of what youâre proposing. So that I can see that youâve done some research and gotten hands on with something that youâre actually playing around with.
So the presentation itself, you have two options, you can either give it live to me via zoom, or you can pre record a video. Even if you pre record the video, we still need to have a scheduled time on Zoom. So I can do some q&a. So make sure you leave time in the schedule for that. It should be presented on or before the Friday of finals week. So that is a week from this Friday, July 29. You can go ahead and schedule your time right now. So if you know that thereâs a time that works for you, get it on my schedule. If you work during the days, and you want to schedule something after 5pm, email me so that I can get you on the schedule, my schedule does tend to fill up pretty quickly that week. So donât be afraid to do that. But like I said, you can either present it live via zoom, and weâll do q&a Right after or you can pre record a video. And then I will watch the video and we will schedule a zoom time where I can do q&a with you after that. So submitting a video that was recorded Friday night that doesnât cover the q&a, youâre going to lose points for that. So make sure that you get that in early enough so that we can schedule some q&a time as well.
Thatâs really all Iâve got this week. Hopefully that helps you understand the final project and whatâs coming up. As always, you can keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord, Iâve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. I do one on one office hours via Calendly you can get in touch with me a lot of different ways. But hopefully youâre getting toward the end of the semester and Iâm sure that I will see a few PowerPoints in this class. So make sure youâd be thinking about your final projects and how you want to present it and make it dynamic. As always if you have any questions, let me know and I will see you once again next week.
Hello, and welcome to the weekend Announcements video for CIS 527 In summer 2022. This week we should be wrapping everything up in the class. So youâve got week seven discussion, which is due today by 1159. And then lab seven and the final project are due on Friday both by 1159. As well, you also should be receiving an email inviting you to complete a TEVAL for this course later today. So make sure you take care of your TEVALs. That information is really really helpful to me as I continue to improve and work on this course.
So for lab seven grading, you donât need to schedule a meeting with me for lab seven, Iâve reconfigured the lab so that you can do it completely online. For task one, youâll submit a set of screenshots showing me that you were able to successfully backup and restore a Windows Active Directory. For task two, youâre going to submit a zip file and a readme that shows your backup process. For task three, I just need the URL where I can find your installation of Munin or Ganglia so I can check to see that thatâs working. And then for a task four, youâll send me the GitLab that youâve created, youâll add add me to it as a collaborator. And then youâll send me the URL where I can actually find that GitLab on your server so that I can check and see as I make changes, do they get deployed to the server properly using a web hook. And then if you do do the extra credit, youâll send me some screenshots as well.
So for your final project, we talked a little bit about this last week. But the big things I need from your final project is a written report, I highly recommend that you use the template that I provide, just to get the headings on it. Remember, the template uses bullets, but your project should not use bullets, it should use paragraphs in that template. So make sure you write that in a professional format. Youâre going to spend your time researching, proposing and doing SWOT analysis, I really want you to focus on the SWOT analysis, and especially on the opportunities and threats and weaknesses. Those tend to be the ones that students really struggle with, they do a pretty good job getting the strengths figured out. But sometimes the weaknesses and the threats really need some work. You can include graphics, data, charts, whatever as needed to make your points, then youâre going to do a live presentation from 15 to 30 minutes long. You can either do that live to me via zoom, or you can record it and weâll talk about that in just a second. Basically, pretend Iâm your CIO, and youâre trying to convince me that youâve analyzed your proposal well, and that it supports your conclusion. Donât forget to include a conclusion at the end that either shows that you should go forward with this project or your SWOT analysis might show that you should not go forward with this project, make sure you make clear in your conclusion which one youâre doing and how youâre supporting that. And then finally, you should have a small prototype that youâll demo, it should be pretty easy to do spend maybe two or four hours on the prototype, not a whole lot of time.
So the presentation you can do live or pre recorded. If you want to do it live schedule a time to present with me, I recommend scheduling that for at least a half hour, probably a full hour to give enough time for q&a and setup. If you want to do a recorded presentation, youâll record the presentation and send it to me ahead of time. And then youâll need to schedule a time to do q&a After Iâve watched your video. So Iâll watch your video first. And then I will do q&a. If you donât schedule a time for q&a After the recorded video, I will take some points off. So to account for that I really do want to have some time to do interaction and questions and answers, even if you record the video. So schedule those now if you need to. You can also email me for any alternate arrangements if youâre not able to present during the day. So just let me know.
So for this week, Iâm going to be sending out TEVALs so make sure that you respond to those quickly. And honestly, all of your comments and feedback are welcome. It really really helps me as I continue to improve this course. So any feedback you have for good or for bad is really, really helpful to me. So please take some time to fill out your TEVALs. For Final Grades, check your grade in Canvas, I will send out an email when everybodyâs grades are finalized, you can email me if you have any concerns, please let me know if thereâs anything missing or incorrect ASAP. So I can go through and get that corrected. Itâs much easier to do that now than it is next Monday when Iâve got grades due immediately.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord. Iâve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. You can join me there. Iâve also got one on one office hours. So lots of different ways you can get in touch and get some help on finishing your final project. But hopefully you get to the point where youâve solved it, youâve cracked the code, everything is working. And hopefully at that point, you continue to have purpose in your life. Hopefully youâve got other things you want to continue working on outside of this course. But as always, if you have any questions, let me know and I will talk to you later this week.
Hello and welcome to the Week 12 announcements video for CIS 527 in Fall 2023. As you can tell, Iâve been a little under the weather, so my voice is a little rough. I apologize for that. This week weâve got a discussion three coming up with Sarah Allen. Sheâll be here next Thursday, so please make sure you mark that on your calendar. Youâve got until next Wednesday to come up with a couple of questions. Youâd like to ask Sarah based on her experience working as a system administrator for McCown -Gordon. After her presentation, youâll have a couple of weeks to work on a response if you werenât able to attend in person. Lab 6, the quizzes are due this week and then Lab 6 is due next week. Lab 6 is kind of one of the big wrap -up labs where we talk about big things like file servers, mapping drives to those file servers, creating application servers, and building some working web applications. Itâs like three or four different things that we all do in different ways, but this uses all your VMs and your digital ocean droplets as well.
One thing thatâs coming up in this class is a final project. The final project is something that you get to propose, either building something or fixing something. The whole idea is youâre not actually going to do the project, but instead what I want you to go through is the process of proposing it and scoping out the idea and then doing a SWOT analysis, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of that idea. Then at the end youâll come to a conclusion whether itâs a good idea or not. This is mostly a thought exercise. It doesnât have to be something that you can actually do, but it should be something that is realistic that you can accomplish using your skills. You can build a new network, you can fix a web app, you can develop a new web resource for a startup like a website or a store, you can set up laptops for a school or maybe even a lab at a school, you can design central authentication or a file server for a company, you can discuss using thin clients versus thick clients and labs, you can discuss using on -prem versus in -the -cloud computing, lots and lots of different things. Basically propose a scenario, give me the parameters of your scenario, are you working with a company, a school, your home, whatever, design the idea, do a SWOT analysis. Itâs very open -ended. Itâs really anything that you want to do, chat with me if you need help finding ideas. One part of the final project is you need to do some sort of a small demo for the project. Donât spend more than a couple hours on it. I really just want you to get your feet wet with a new idea or a new technology or something we havenât played around with yet as part of your final project.
So as weâre working on stuff, donât forget to look at the GitHub Education Pack. You can go to DigitalOcean for a free trial offer. If you havenât done that yet for Lab 5, thereâs also Namecheap .me. If you need a domain name, anything like that. Otherwise, hopefully things are going well. Please feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions. Weâve got office hours. Watch the deadlines on Canvas. The proposal for your final project is due December 1st. And then the actual final project is due December 15th. What youâll turn in for the final project is a 7 to 15 minute video of you discussing your project and youâll turn in your write -up. Thatâs really all you have to do. Itâs pretty simple. You can record the video using Zoom or OBS or any other tool that you prefer. I would like to see you on camera as you talk through things. I think thatâs really important. But if you have any questions or concerns, let me know. Otherwise, we are nearing the end of the semester. Weâre on week 12 of 16, so hopefully things are going well. Weâve just got a couple more weeks before Thanksgiving breaks. So keep up the good work, work warily hard on lab six, and let me know if you have any questions. Good luck.
Hello and welcome to week one of CIS 527. This video is basically a weekly announcements video. I probably wonât do one each week, but itâs 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 youâve seen the introductory videos, but if not, my name is Russ Feldhausen. Iâll 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, Iâve made a few changes. One of the biggest changes is Iâm 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 wasnât really good for students. And it wasnât really good for me either. And so this semester, Iâm 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 youâre 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 youâre going to be unavailable instead of making up stuff after that deadline. Basically, Iâm 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 Iâve made is the final project now includes a prototype portion. Originally, the final project just required you to design and analyze something. Iâve decided this semester that Iâd also like you to prototype part of your design, that doesnât mean that you have to build the whole thing or that you have to make it completely ready for the real world. But Iâd like you to show some modicum of ability to design and develop the thing that youâre proposing. So this might be a little interesting. Weâll kind of see how that goes. But make sure you review the final project information closely. Especially if youâre familiar with how this class has been taught in the past because it is a little different this semester.
Finally, the other thing Iâm doing diiferent this summer is Iâve decided to add some interactive discussions to this class that will be worth 10% of your grade. Weâll talk a little bit more about those as we get started. But basically, what weâre going to do is weâre 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. Weâd 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. Weâll 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. Weâre 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 whatâs going on. So thatâs something a little bit new. Weâll see how that works. That will hopefully couple really well with the other thing weâll do, which is weâll continue to do our tea time office hours every week. So youâll see messages about that. But itâs 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, whatâs going on in the world, whatever. So weâd 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, thereâs 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. Thereâs 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, Iâll 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, thatâs all Iâve got for week one. Good luck this semester. Feel free to keep in touch if you have any questions and Iâll probably post a couple more of these announcements videos as we go forward. So good luck have a good day!
Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements video. Iâm 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 youâre done with lab three, if not, you should be getting done with that pretty quickly. So if you havenât 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 youâre struggling on the SNMP, part of lab three, there is some information on Piazza that will help you out with that. Also, donât 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 Iâm hoping everybody can make it. And then also, donât 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, youâre 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 youâll also need at least one Ubuntu client. You can either do it with two different snapshots or what Iâve started doing is actually just making a second Ubuntu client for the Windows Active Directory on Ubuntu part itâs 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 youâll 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 werenât 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. Thereâs absolutely no expectation from either BreAnn or myself that you will be able to complete this class without asking questions. Thatâs part of the point. However, I donât give you all the answers in the lab instructions, because if I did that, then the class would be kind of pointless. So thereâs 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 donât be afraid to ask us for help. This is literally what BreAnn and I are paid to do. Itâs especially what BreAnn is paid to do. But itâs also what Iâm 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 donât 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 youâre 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 thatâs okay. Imposter syndrome was totally a thing. But also, Iâm an introvert. I hate asking questions. And so youâre also welcome to ask your question anonymously. And so your fellow students wonât see who you are,. Obviously, if you post some identifying details in your post thatâs 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 youâre truly stuck and you canât 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, youâre more than welcome to do that; both BreAnn and I have Calendly links available that you can use anytime youâd 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 weâre 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 thatâs 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 youâll 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 weâre 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 wasnât 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 didnât have in my slides here, but I want to mention really quickly, if you are done with a lab assignment and youâd 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 isnât there is some of the Canvas specific stuff like the quizzes and the discussions. And so for example, if youâre done with lab three and youâre waiting to get graded, you can go ahead and start watching the videos for lab four on that website. Again, itâs 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; itâs 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 donât 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 itâs 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 youâre 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. Theyâre going to talk all about how they work to set up a high performance computing infrastructure, how they monitor it, how they maintain it. Itâs usually really cool. So Iâm looking forward to that. So weâll see you today at four oâclock for that. Next week. Weâre 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 itâs something really cool that you might not be aware of that we have at K-State. So weâre going to have Caleb Fleming and probably a couple others from the cybersecurity club. Come talk about that. I have also tentatively scheduled K-Stateâs CIO to come in one of the last two weeks of the class. Iâm 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. Itâs always one of the great speakers to try and get in is K-Stateâs CIO so that you can get kind of a top down view of whatâs going on at K-State. If you donât 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. Donât forget the week two discussion is today at 4pm. The week one discussion response, if you werenât able to attend and participate in person, is due tonight by midnight. This Thursday, BreAnn is unavailable, sheâs 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 donât make any guarantees that I will be quick. The week three discussion is next Monday at 4pm. Again, thatâs 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 youâre not able to attend today is due Monday, July 6 at midnight. So lots of things coming up.
Finally, a quick reminder, donât 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. Thereâs 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 thereâs somebody in the class that shares an interest with you and would like to work together. Donât 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 weâll 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 donât end up with this situation where youâre looking for a time, the day itâs due, and thereâs no time left because theyâre already booked. So keep the final project in mind. If youâre not sure what you want to do, and you want to talk with me about some possible project ideas, Iâd be happy to do that Iâve got a few ideas that I can kind of pitch around and see if thereâs something youâre interested in.
So finally, donât 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. Iâm on Tea Time office hours every Tuesday and Friday, although we wonât be on this Friday because of the holiday. BreAnn and I both host one on one office hours that youâre welcome to join. Iâm also on the K-State Rocket.chat server. You can find me on K-Stateâs Microsoft Teams. Go to my website. Iâm easy to find about anywhere. Please feel free to keep in touch, ask us questions, weâd love to hear from you.
And thatâs 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 donât be afraid to roll back to a snapshot and try again, if something doesnât 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
Good morning and welcome to the week five announcements video. Iâm coming to you live and unscripted once again from my dining room just to cover a little bit about whatâs 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, youâre 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. Weâre 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 itâs the 17th of July.
So, coming up next, weâve got lab four thatâs 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; thereâs a pretty lengthy post Piazza post going into some of those discussions. Iâve 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 youâre having trouble, please talk to us and let us know if you have any questions.
For lab five, youâre going to be creating actual cloud resources using DigitalOcean. So youâll 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, weâre going to be using some cloud resources that you may or may not have used before. If you havenât already, you should sign up for the GitHub developer pack at the URL at the top of this slide. Itâs a really great way to get lots of discounts online. Overall, in this lab, weâre going to use DigitalOcean. So weâll need two DigitalOcean droplets that run about $5 a month. Weâll also use a load balancer just for lab five, the load balancer itself runs $10 a month, but youâll use it for a day. So your your total cost should be less than $1. Weâll also use a domain from NameCheap which you can go to nc.me and get a free domain for the first year if youâre a student. For DigitalOcean. If you donât 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 theyâre 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 donât have the ability to do this, please let me know so that we can make alternative arrangements. In years past, Iâve 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 itâs written, itâs 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 Iâve got it configured.
After lab five, then youâll 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, youâll set up both a front end and a back end system. So youâll have your front end with your web interface your back end with your database. And with the file servers, weâll actually learn how to automatically map those resources to our different virtual machines.
Lastly, if you have any questions, donât 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 Iâm 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 havenât come to me and asked for help. And so I always want to remind you that it isnât 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 donât know where my resources are best spent. So if you have questions or concerns, reach out to me anytime, let me know and Iâd be happy to work with you to get those things resolved.
Other than that, good luck on lab four. Hopefully youâre 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 oâclock. So have a good day.
Happy Monday morning Iâm coming to you once again live and unscripted for our week six announcements video in CIS 527. I apologize for my Coronavirus hair. I havenât gotten a haircut since March. So itâs definitely been interesting doing some of these videos and watching me change over the semester. I hope everybodyâs doing well with the pandemic. I know itâs really tough right now. Iâm living in Kansas City, and itâs really crazy right here. So I hope everybodyâs staying safe and staying healthy.
Okay, so where weâre at - lab four was due last Friday. I think last time I checked about half the class had that turned in. So if you donât 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. Donât 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 weekâs discussion actually had to be moved to tomorrow because of a scheduling conflict with our guest. So today at 4pm, Iâll 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. Iâm 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 itâs 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, youâre going to be building virtual machines in the cloud. So if you havenât yet, youâll 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 youâre logging in from, and then you copy that key to the destination. On Windows, I really donât 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 isnât as good as it should be. On your host, youâll also need to configure your firewall and then youâll set up some virtual hosts and certificates using Apache and certbot. Generally, lab five doesnât take too long. Itâs just a lot of reading and getting through the material the first time but the actual lab content shouldnât take all that long to get completed.
Then on lab six, youâre going to do three big things. In your droplets on DigitalOcean youâll 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. Youâll 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 youâll also set up a file server in Samba - generally just editing the Samba config file is enough. And then youâll 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 doesnât 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. Iâm sure Seth would be more than willing to talk to you about that as well. And so finally, on the final project, if you donât have any good ideas, feel free to talk to either BreAnn or I - weâve got some ideas we can share. We can kind of chew on things back and forth and see whatâs interesting to you and how we can fit that into something that makes a final project. So the best thing I can say is donât 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, hereâs my usual slide. Donât be afraid to keep in touch. Thereâs 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. Weâd 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 teamâs server just to try that out for the last couple weeks of the semester.
But other than that, weâre getting close to the end of the semester, we only have three weeks left. So nowâs the time to start making sure youâre 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.
Good morning everyone and welcome to our week seven announcements video. Iâm coming to you live and unscripted here from kind of a rainy Kansas City this morning. So letâs get right to it. First off, hereâs where weâre at. Last Friday, lab five and six were due. So if you havenât 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, donât 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 donât 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-Stateâs CIO whoâs going to be joining us and hopefully heâll 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 Iâm hoping thatâs 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 weâll discuss lab seven here in a bit. Also, donât forget your proposals for the final project are due this Friday. So be thinking about your final projects if you havenât 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 youâre 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 shouldnât impact anything that youâre 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 youâre aware of that. Also, thereâs 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, thatâs something I added new this year. To do that, youâre going to have to give one of your Ubuntu VMs four gigabytes of RAM in order to handle the ELK stack. If that doesnât work, let us know. Itâs something Iâm 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 thatâs below that.
And finally for lab seven, weâve 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 weâll grade stuff live for you in person. However, if youâd 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, youâll submit a zip file of your backup and a readme that describes how your backup is built. For task three, youâll 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, youâll 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. Youâve 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. Thereâs a few different ideas here, setting up web resources for a startup, building laptops for school, central authentication, thin clients vs. thick clients. Thereâs 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 youâre 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. Itâs 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, thatâs 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 youâre on a team have to youâll 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. Iâm 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. Youâre 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. Itâs much much easier to fix grading problems now than it is Friday or the Monday after the end of the semester when Iâm trying to submit grades to KSIS. So please make sure youâre 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. Donât forget, we have our tea time office hours, which are Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. Itâs 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, Iâm still on Rocket.chat. And we have our live discussion today at four oâclock 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 - weâre at the end of the semester. So weâre 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.
Good morning and welcome to the last weekly announcements video for CIS 527 for summer 2020. Iâm really excited to see the end of the semester and I hope you are too. Hereâs a few quick things to keep in mind for this week. First off lab seven was due last Friday. So if you havenât completed and turned in lab seven, make sure you do that ASAP. If you look on Piazza, thereâs information about how to turn in lab seven completely offline so you donât have to get any live grading done. But if youâre having trouble with it, you can always schedule a live grading time especially if you want us to look at what youâre doing and see if we can give you at least partial credit for it. So please make sure you do that. If youâve 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 havenât 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, donât forget the final project proposal was due Friday, I believe I got a final project proposal from most everybody in the class. So thatâs really great. I posted comments and feedback on those so you can check that out on Canvas anytime. Also, donât 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 havenât scheduled your time for your final project presentation, please do so now. My Friday afternoon is already almost completely booked up. So make sure youâre looking at my calendar and planning ahead accordingly. Just because you get it done on Friday doesnât mean you may have time to present it if you havenât scheduled a time, so donât forget to do that. I generally prefer presentations on Thursday and Friday of this week. But if you think youâll get done sooner you can schedule earlier than that. So check our Calendly availability and see when weâre available. Also, please bear in mind that BreAnn doesnât 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, youâll 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, thatâs 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 youâre proposing and then detailing the SWOT analysis as you perform. Generally, Iâve 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. Itâs 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 youâre on a team of two, it will be twice that long. So schedule about a 30 minute block with me. And thatâs when weâll 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 youâve analyzed it well by going through your proposal and your SWOT analysis, and convince me that this is something our company should do. So thatâs 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 itâs 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 youâve 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 donât 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. Itâs 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, weâre getting toward the end of the semester. So make sure youâre 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 itâs 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 youâre more than welcome to join those even after this class ends. Weâre 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, itâs always on my website, itâs always on my email signature. And I will be on the K-State CS Rocket.chat for the foreseeable future. Weâll also probably be implementing Teams at some point. So basically, feel free to keep in touch with me any way that youâd like. Iâd 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, itâs really great for me to see that.
Other than that itâs final project season. So itâs 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, youâre able to get it done soon this week. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and let me know. Otherwise, itâs been an honor having you in my class and I look forward to seeing all of you in the future. Have a good day.
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 itâs kind of fun to do these videos just so I can chat with you a little bit and tell you about whatâs going on in the course. So once again, Iâm Russell Feldhausen. Iâm your instructor for this course My contact information is here on this slide. I work remotely from Kansas City. And so Iâm not usually on campus very often. But Iâm almost always at my computer and Iâm 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, Iâll try and keep an eye on discord throughout the day, this summer.
So this course has changed a little bit over the years that weâve taught it online. Thereâs a couple of things that were new last summer that weâre continuing this summer. The big thing is now weâve added due dates. So there is actually one module due each week, itâs 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 theyâre just simply werenât deadlines. To go with that we now have a late work penalty. So once a lab is due, itâs 10% off of the total number of points available in that lab per day that itâs late, I think it goes down to a minimum of 60. So anything below 60%, there wonât 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 Iâm going to continue with that this year. The big thing with the prototype is it doesnât have to be too big, you donât actually have to build what youâre proposing in the final project, you just have to build a small prototype so that youâve played around a little bit with the technology itself. So that itâs 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 weâre going to do that again this summer. And Iâll talk a little bit about that here in just a second.
The lab grading in this course is a little bit unique. What youâll do to get your labs graded is youâll schedule a time to meet with me virtually using my calendly link, thereâs 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 thereâs only certain days or times youâre 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 oâclock in the morning for some time yet that morning, those times wonât 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 youâre 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 Iâll have you walk through parts of your lab and show me how itâs 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 weâll look for some partial credit to see where youâre at. But a lot of this course is a completion course it either works or it doesnât. And youâll get points if it works. And you get some points, maybe no points if it doesnât work. So itâs really on you to make sure that your labs are complete and working when youâre ready to have them graded. The other thing I will stay with grading. As soon as you start grading with me, youâre not allowed to make any changes to your labs. Even if halfway through the grading process, you realize you did something wrong. Itâs already too late, you started grading. So thatâs 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 itâs like changing the answers on a test after you hand it in to your teacher. So as soon as we start grading, you wonât be able to make any changes to your labs, and youâll get the score that youâll 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, Iâve got them pretty much scheduled. If you look on canvas, youâll already see the schedule out there. I just need to put names on the times. Weâll have one discussion per week, I actually will schedule it all eight weeks of the semester. The weeks we donât have a guest speaker weâll 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. Theyâll 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 arenât 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, thatâs one way you can get those points. If youâre not able to attend in person, you can watch the video afterwards. And Iâll have a little prompt that I want you to respond to based on what you saw in the video. So youâll watch the video, write your response, and youâll get your points that way, I really encourage you to attend the live sessions, if at all possible, weâve got some great speakers coming in. And itâs 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 Iâm pretty active on so you can always chat with me there. If youâre not on that server, you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu. Itâll 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 doesnât work, and Iâd be happy to help you with that. Weâll 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 youâd like the tee time link and Iâll 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 Iâm 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week two announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, donât forget today itâs 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 havenât 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 donât email me tomorrow or the next day letting me know that you had to work today. Thatâs 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 youâll need to join the discord server and introduce yourself and as soon as you do that, Iâll respond. And I will put in the points for that. When you introduce yourself. Donât be afraid to youâre actually encouraged to ask me a question. Donât be afraid to ask me anything that you want to know. Iâm really happy to answer any questions you have about myself, my background, this class, anything that you want. So thatâs do this Wednesday. The other thing thatâs due this Wednesday is you need to submit two questions for our guest speaker thatâs coming in on Thursday. Seth Galitzer Iâll talk about him in just a second. But you need to submit two questions on canvas as part of that as well. And thatâs due by Wednesday night 11:59. Then on Thursday, we have our speaker Seth Galitzer heâs coming in at 3:30 on Thursday via zoom. If you can be there live, that would be fantastic. Weâd love to have a really good discussion with him so that he feels like itâs a good use of his time. But if you canât make it because of any other conflicts, you can watch the video afterwards and write a little written prompt and youâll be able to get your points that way. And then finally, donât 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 Iâll talk about in a second. We donât have to do live grading with that.
So donât forget one of the things Iâd like you to do is introduce yourself on Discord. discord is a great place for you to ask quick questions as youâre working on lab get some clarification. Usually if Iâm 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 donât guarantee any particular response time on Discord. so be warned. If you post something on discord and itâs 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. Iâll probably use it throughout the semester to post news and current events and things that we can discuss there. Iâll also post a lot of reminders there. I wonât 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, donât 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 heâs been in that role since I believe 2006, which is when I was an undergraduate here at K state. He actually has a bachelorâs degree in Computer Science from K-State. And heâs 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 Sethâs purview. Heâs got a few students to work for him as well, his counterpart, Earl Harris, retired last year. So itâs now just Seth thatâs 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 youâll get to talk to this semester. So please come with questions about how the computer science systems work, how itâs 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, youâre basically going to redo lab one, but this time, youâre going to set up your VMs using puppet instead of doing it manually. So for lab two, the short version is youâll reinstall the operating system, usually on a new virtual machine, you can delete the VMs that youâve used for lab one, as soon as theyâre greater than youâre 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 doesnât work, you can restore back to that state. snapshot before youâve ever applied the manifest. to test it. Again, if you donât make a snapshot, and you want to undo some of the changes your manifest does, youâre probably going to have to reinstall your operating system. And thatâs a really, really tough thing to do when youâre 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, youâll have less than 400 lines of code total. So try not to make this too complicated. Iâve had some students get really stuck in the weeds trying to make this super fancy, it really doesnât 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, donât be afraid to keep in touch in this class. Weâll 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, Iâll be doing training sessions on Friday mornings. So Iâm guessing tea time office hours will start late if they started all unless somebody else jumps on. So hopefully weâll 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, thatâs kind of the point I am having you redo lab one. But Iâm 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, youâll 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 weâll go into lab three and lab four, where weâre 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2021. So weâre on week three, which means that lab do⌠is lab two is due tonight at 7pm. So make sure you get that submitted, as weâll talk about in a brief moment, the only things you have to submit on lab two are your two puppet manifest files. Thatâs 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 thatâs 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. Theyâre due at midnight on Wednesday night. And then Thursday at 330. We have our guest speaker itâs Dr. Gary Pratt. Iâll talk about him in just a second. And then next week, youâll be working on week, lab three, which will be due next Monday at 7pm.
So as I mentioned before, on lab two grading itâs Canvas only you donât need to schedule a meeting with me. However, if youâd like to talk to me about lab two or have any questions on lab two, youâre welcome to schedule a meeting. But for those of you that have already scheduled a meeting, if you donât need it for grading, youâre welcome to cancel that meeting or just email me and let me know that you donât 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. Heâs been in that role since 2017. And if Iâm 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 heâs 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. Heâs 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, youâre going to start working on lab three, lab three is getting toward the more difficult parts of this class. Itâs not the most difficult lab, but itâs toward the top of the list. In lab three, youâre going to set up and configure some core networking services. So youâll set static IP addresses on some systems, youâre going to configure remote access using remote desktop and SSH, youâre going to install a DNS and DHCP server and get them configured. Youâre 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 youâve 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 thatâs really useful information Iâve written up over the past couple years. And of course, the big thing is if youâre unsure, donât 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. Thereâs lots of ways that you can get help on this lab. In general, I tell students, if youâre working on a problem for more than about an hour, and you havenât made any progress, thatâs 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 donât be afraid to ask questions if you get stuck.
Other than that, like I always say keep in touch with me. Thereâs Discord. Thereâs 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 Iâm working with and weâll pick up again at Fridays as well. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me Iâm always available. So hopefully as you work in this lab, youâll feel like youâre getting some networking figured out. Hopefully, I think this is a really useful lab, especially as you go into any sort of networked environment. Itâs one of the more useful labs Iâve 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements for cis 527 in summer 2021. Iâm 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, weâve got lab three, itâs due tonight by 7pm. This lab does require live grading. So if you havenât 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 youâll 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, weâll be working on lab four, which will be due the following Monday. Actually, I think itâs 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. Youâll 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 weâll take a look at your DNS server settings. Weâll also take a look at the lookups for DNS and make sure that thatâs working. And weâll check the SNMP and Wireshark. Mostly Iâll 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 havenât 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. Donât forget, when youâre reading the assignments, make sure you read them very carefully. Iâve 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, thereâs 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, donât be afraid to ask questions. If youâre stuck on something, the one thing I donât want you to do in this class is sit there and spin your wheels. If youâve spent more than an hour or half an hour or so googling and really working hard on a problem, and youâre not making any progress. Thatâs the time to take a step back and ask me for help. Because there are situations you can get into where systems arenât working the way they should, or youâve made a bad assumption or something didnât install correctly. And I can help you pinpoint whether thatâs the case or not. And whether itâs something you can actually try and get past or if itâs something you need to start over. So big thing is donât be afraid to ask me questions in this class, Iâm more than willing to help answer them.
So our speaker this Thursday are the two Beocat system admins, Adam Tygart and Kyle Hutson, theyâve managed K-State supercomputer theyâve 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. Theyâre 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 itâs 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 theyâre really a wealth of knowledge, I hope that you enjoy talking to them.
So coming up this week, weâve got lab four. Lab four is all about working with Active Directory and open LDAP to create authentication systems. So youâll install a Windows Server VM, youâll configure Active Directory, open LDAP, youâll configure clients to log in against each of those. And then weâre also going to configure a little bit of interoperability so that youâre 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 youâre 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 doesnât work.
So thatâs all Iâve got for this week. As always, please feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got good discussions going on Discord, youâre more than welcome to join and chat with me there. Weâll 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, weâre still doing just Tuesdays at 330. However, in a couple weeks, once I get done with my teacher training program, weâll 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 thatâs all I got this week. I hope that this week as youâre going through working with Active Directory and open LDAP, you donât 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 doesnât work. And you donât know why. And itâs almost easier to start over than to try and figure out why it doesnât work in the first place. So if you have to roll back and try again, donât 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week five announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, youâve got lab four, itâs actually due tomorrow, which is Wednesday by 7pm. So hopefully youâre getting things done with lab four. Also on Wednesday, youâll have your question responses for last weekâs discussion and the questions for this upcoming weekâs discussion due that night by 11:59pm. Our speaker this week is Hunter Guthrie. Iâll talk a little bit more about him in just a second. And then weâre going to switch back to Mondays at 7pm. From here on out. So next week, lab five is due on Monday. So itâs kind of a quick turnaround. But I donât think it will be a big problem as we talked about lab five.
So for lab four grading, there are a couple of things Iâm 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 thatâs able to login via your windows Active Directory as well. So it sounds a lot simpler than it is. But itâs really just very few outcomes that weâre looking for in this particular lab.
So as before, to be successful in this class, make sure youâre reading all the assignments carefully. Make sure youâre looking at all the posted information, including the diagram for this lab, thereâs 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, donât be afraid to ask questions. If youâre sitting there spinning your wheels trying to work on the same problem for longer than about a half hour or so thatâs 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 wonât 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 youâre unfamiliar with the area is the nuclear power plant thatâs a little bit south of Topeka. And so heâs 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, youâre going to start working on lab five, lab five, weâre going to be taking things into the cloud. So for lab five, youâre going to create two droplets on digitalocean, youâre going to set up SSH, so you can connect to your droplets and connect between the droplets, youâll set up firewalls on your droplets. And weâre just going to start with simple Apache websites. The other big thing youâre going to do is create a DNS name that will point to those droplets. So if you donât already have your own domain name, nowâs a good chance to get one Lab five does require you to sign up for a couple of things online. If you havenât 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, nowâs the chance to do it. With the GitHub pack, you get $100 of free digitalocean credit if youâre 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 havenât 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 youâve 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, youâll 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 donât 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, itâs useful for you to get some experience in a real cloud. And I found that digitalocean is the easiest one to use. And so thatâs what weâre going to do. I have had several students asked me why we donât use AWS, Amazon Web Services in this class, and itâs 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 youâre comfortable with cloud concepts in digitalocean, making the shift from there to Amazon Web Services isnât 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 thatâs why we do digitalocean I think itâs a good choice for this class. So thatâs all I got for this week.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. Iâm on Discord. As always, Iâm 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, Iâll have tea time today at 330. So you can catch me there. Weâll 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 thatâs all Iâve got for this week for the cloud. Iâm going to leave you with this quick XKCD comic. I think itâs also in my slides. But itâs really fun thinking about the cloud in terms of itâs really just somebody elseâs computer. And so in theory, there could just be one computer out there. That is the cloud for everyone else. So thatâs all Iâve 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
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 Iâve got meetings for most everybody already on my calendar. So thatâs great. It looks like everybodyâs keeping up so far. Then weâve got our speaker coming up, we didnât have a speaker last week, weâve rescheduled Hunter to the week after this one. So you donât have a response due this week. But you do have questions for our next speaker, which is going to be Sarah. Sheâs going to be speaking this week. So donât forget to get those questions turned in. And the next week, youâll 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 everythingâs 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, weâll have you check a couple of things theyâre around your firewall will SSH to your back end weâll check the firewall and stuff there. And then lastly, Iâll use basically Iâll 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 doesnât take too long as long as everythingâs working. But if somethingâs not working, itâs really important to get this lab figured out because it really builds into the next two labs that youâll 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 youâd 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 itâs like to be in that part of the industry.
So coming up, this week, weâll be working on lab six, which is all about file servers and application servers on the file server side on your VMs. Locally, youâll be creating a file server on both Ubuntu and on your Windows Server. And then youâll be setting up some automatic drive mappings on the windows side youâll use the Group Policy editor to set up a group policy so that those drives automatically mount there. On the Linux side, youâll edit a couple of config files to have them mount either automatically via fstab, or youâll 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, youâll do this in the cloud, what youâll actually do is install WordPress from the zip file that you get from WordPress. And youâll set it up so that the WordPress website runs on your front end server, but it connects to the database thatâs on your back end server. And this is a little tricky the first time youâve done it, but hopefully you can get it working. On the windows side youâll 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⌠itâs 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 youâre working with, itâs 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, Iâm 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 donât 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 youâre doing. For example, if youâre 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 youâre 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. Thereâs all sorts of things out there. You donât 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 youâre 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, donât be afraid to keep in touch. Iâm 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. Iâve got tee time office hours, Tuesdays at 330. And this week will be the last week that we wonât do Friday. Starting next week. Weâll try and do Friday again. So thereâs 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 nowâs the time to be thinking about getting your final project done getting things wrapped up making sure that youâve got all your ducks in a row so that youâre 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week seven announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So weâve only got two weeks left in the class, which means thereâs a lot of stuff wrapping up this week. So donât 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, weâve got our next last round of discussion responses due and the questions for our last presenter are due on Wednesday. This Thursday, weâre having our speaker Hunter Guthrie, itâs 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. Iâll talk a little bit about that in just a second. And then next week on Monday is lab seven.
So for lab six grading, thereâs a lot of stuff we need to see, but itâs pretty simple. First off, youâll be setting up a Windows File Server. So I just want you to show me that youâve 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, youâll create a Windows web application, youâll 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 weâll check to make sure that works. And then in the cloud, youâll be installing most likely WordPress for the back end and front end, and so on, weâll 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 everythingâs working, if everything is not working, it can take a little bit of time. But hopefully weâll get through that. In the next week.
Lab seven is the last lab in this class, itâs kind of a catch all for a whole bunch of things. So have you do some backup and restore, weâll talk about some monitoring. And we will do some DevOps work. So keep an eye on that Iâm probably going to quickly post an update to that lab later today. And Iâll send out an email when I get that done. So youâll have that lab.
Our speaker this week is again, Hunter Guthrie. Heâs a system administrator for Evergy, specifically at the Wolf Creek generating station, which is the nuclear power plant that is south of Topeka. Heâs another former student of mine. And Iâm 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, youâll need to be working on your final project. Itâs due at the end of next week, so youâve 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 thatâs already going and how you want to change that you could discuss how youâd 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 Iâd 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 youâre going. So I can see enough that youâre on the right track. I will try and get to those Saturday and grade those really quickly. So youâll get some quick feedback for me. But thatâs really what Iâm looking for is to make sure that youâve got your final project topic in place by the end of this week. And the next week, youâll 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 youâll turn in is a written report. Thereâs a template that I give thatâs 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 donât 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 youâve done enough analysis and research to understand it and make a convincing case. Youâll also do a live presentation roughly 15 to 30 minutes again, convince me that youâve analyzed it well and that youâve 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 youâre talking about authentication systems, you might download and install a different authentication system. Thatâs really all Iâm 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 youâve 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 oâclock on Friday. I can also do after five oâclock on Thursday. So let me know if youâre 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. Iâm on Discord. We have zoom discussions. Weâll 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 thatâs all Iâve got for this week. Hopefully itâll be working on your final projects, getting your labs wrapped up, youâll 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week eight announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, here we are, itâs the last week of the class. This week, you should be working on lab seven, which is due tonight, itâs due by 11:59pm. And Iâll explain that in just a sec. We also have the week seven discussion response thatâs due on Wednesday. So make sure you get that in. Iâll get the video posted later today. For Friday, your final projects to do by 1159 at night, and weâll talk a little bit about that. And then weâll also talk about TEVALS.
So first off, for lab seven grading, you really donât need to meet with me via zoom to do lab seven grading. As long as everythingâs working, you should be able to submit stuff via Canvas, and Iâll be able to grade it from there. However, if youâre having trouble or something isnât quite working, itâs 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, youâll send a zip file with your backup and a readme document describing how to restore it. For three, youâre going to install Munin or Ganglia. And so youâll 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 Iâll 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, thereâs 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, youâve got a written report that youâre working on. Thereâs 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, thereâs really no minimum or maximum size, what I generally tell people is make it long enough so that I understand what youâre talking about, and short enough that I donât 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, youâre going to present your material and convince me that youâve analyzed it well. And that it either is a good idea based on your analysis, or it isnât a good idea based on your analysis. So if you havenât scheduled that, please make sure you get your presentation time scheduled soon. So you get the time slot you want. Iâm mostly free Thursday and Friday. So you should be able to find a time that works, I hope. And weâll talk about scheduling in just a second. And then also donât 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 donât intend on watching any presentations at 11 oâclock 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. Thatâs the only real way that I get feedback from you about what to do and what to change about this class. Itâs totally anonymous, I canât see any of your feedback until final grades are submitted in this semester. Actually, I donât 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 thatâs taken this class previously, they will tell you that it has changed a lot specifically based on their TEVAL feedback. So itâs 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 youâll be able to take a look and make sure everything looks the way you expect. I donât think there shouldnât be any surprises in this course at this point.
Other than that, please make sure you keep on keep in touch with me. Youâre 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 youâre 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. Iâm always happy to do that. Even if you just want to chat about life or the universe or anything else thatâs going on, feel free to connect with me anytime you want. So other than that, thatâs getting toward the end of this class. This is probably the last announcements video youâll see for me. Itâs 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. My name is Russell Feldhausen, and Iâll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is listed here, and itâs 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 thereâs lots of other options that are listed on my website and on the syllabus.
So this class is a class that Iâve taught for several semesters at this point. So thereâs not a whole lot thatâs new this time around. Basically, youâll have one module of work due every other week. There is a late work penalty in this class, itâs 10% off of the total points possible on the assignment per day, so make sure you donât get too far behind. I also have added a prototype portion to the final project. So if youâre familiar with previous versions of this class, thatâs a little bit new here. In every semester I also make minor changes in each labs. So make sure that youâre reading the labs for the current semester in this Canvas course. Weâll 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 weâre 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, Iâm 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, weâll come up with some way that you can opt into the beta labs and help me test them for some credit. Iâm considering maybe even replacing the last module in this class with one of these beta labs. So weâll 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, youâll 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 youâre done with the lab. So for example, if youâre working on your lab on Friday, and you think youâll 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 youâre 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 somethingâs due or right at the end of the day, itâs not going to let you. When we meet, weâll meet via zoom, and Iâll have you use screenshare. So I can see what youâre 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 youâre sure you want to start. And as soon as you confirm that at that time, whatâs there is there you canât make any changes. Once youâve started grading, even if you notice something thatâs missing, itâs kind of like you turned in the assignment to me and then later on, you realized you missed something, you canât go back and fix it. So itâs 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 canât change anything, itâs going to be whatever I see as we go through. So keep keep that in mind. Itâs usually not a problem. But everyoneâs while students will realize, Oh crap, I forgot to turn on the firewall. Itâs already too late. So keep that in mind.
This semester, weâve got some interactive discussions youâll 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 Iâd 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. Theyâre more than willing to answer your questions, especially some of the speakers like the K-Stateâs CIO, and I know both Seth and Kyle here in the computer science department would love to talk to students any time so donât be afraid to reach out to them. But Iâd be happy to send an email on your behalf to get some answers.
Other than that, thatâs really all thatâs going on this semester. Hopefully everythingâs pretty self explanatory on Canvas. If you have any questions, let me know anytime. What Iâd 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 youâre 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 youâre 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. Itâs 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, weâd 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.
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 havenât already, I think Iâve 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 Iâve posted in the discussion. Also, if you have any questions youâd like to ask that speaker based on what youâve 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, Iâm hoping each question will get a couple two or three sentences in your response, just to show that youâve watch the video and really thought deeply about it.
So for lab two, youâre going to be redoing basically everything you did on lab one, but this time, instead of doing it manually, youâre going to use a tool called puppet to automate a lot of that. So for lab two, youâre going to reinstall your operating system in a set of new VMs. Youâll install puppet in those VMs, run all the updates and everything. And then youâre going to make a snapshot in VMware. And itâs 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, youâll 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 donât 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 itâs 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 youâre getting into the 1000s of lines of code for this puppet manifest file, youâre probably making it way too difficult. And try and keep it simpler. If you have any questions, let me know Iâm happy to help you through this. I also will talk really briefly about grading itâs 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 donât get applied correctly the first time. But after reboot, they will take effect and then the rest of it can happen. So thatâs the process I use for grading. Also, for lab two, you donât 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.
Thatâs really it for this period. Things seem to be going really well in this class. I havenât had a whole lot of questions. So I think everythingâs going well. Feel free to keep in touch. We can have discussions on discord, youâre 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 Iâm happy to answer. So as you work on lab to hopefully your reaction is kind of like this where youâre like âseriously, I have to do this again?â But thatâs kind of the point a lot of system administration and especially as you watch our speakers from last summer, theyâre going to talk a lot about the importance of automation in System Administration. And so thatâs where weâre going with this lab is now weâve done it manually. Letâs 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.
Hello, and welcome to the announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021, Iâm coming to you today from the CS video studio here on campus. Hopefully Iâll be able to do that a couple more times this semester. But thatâs 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. Weâll talk about turning that in here in just a second. Thereâs also the first discussion thatâs due tonight. So if you havenât participated in the discussions, youâll need to fill out your response to the video by tonight. And then weâll talk about lab three a little bit later. Itâs tentatively due on October 4. But as weâll discuss here in just a minute, that might change.
So for lab two, youâll be working on manifest files for puppet, all you have to do is submit those via Canvas, thereâs no Live Meeting required. And once you submit those on Canvas, Iâll 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, youâre going to be diving into the world of networking. So in this lab, weâre going to set up an Ubuntu server by basically duplicating one of our existing a boon to VMs. Weâll set static IP address on it. And then weâll install a lot of core networking services, DNS, DHCP, SNMP. Thereâs a lot of technical stuff in here. And itâs 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 doesnât make sense. Let me know Iâd 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 Iâll 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 Iâd 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 youâd like to go for that due date or if youâd 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 shouldnât 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, donât be afraid to keep in touch. Iâm on Discord. Iâm 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, thatâs all this week. Hopefully you enjoy building some networking this week. Itâs a really cool part of system administration, and itâs 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.
Hello and welcome to the week nine announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2021. So youâre 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 weâll talk about in just a second. And then also donât forget, every other week, youâve got a discussion response due so if you havenât done that yet, go watch the video from the previous semesters, discussions, and then write up your short response.
So for lab five, weâre moving into the cloud, the cloud has become a big part of system administration, and itâs something that we definitely need to spend some time on. So what weâll do in the cloud, weâll 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, weâll set up SSH, so we can remotely access to it, weâll set up a firewall, weâll set up a couple of simple websites using Apache. And then weâll 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 donât 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, Iâve 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. Itâs really not meant to be that high. The other thing I do say if you donât want to work in the cloud services for any reason, because itâs university, I canât force you to use some of these cloud resources, I do have alternative plans. So if you really donât want to do this in the cloud, and youâd 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 youâd rather do this on tools, such as Amazon web services, or AWS, thatâs fine. Everything I have is written for DigitalOcean. Itâs 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 itâs kind of up to you how you would like to do that.
So when we get to lab five grading, the big things Iâll 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, youâll set this up using SSH keys. So it should be really easy to do. On both systems, weâll check the firewall weâll check the date and time and some other settings. And then weâll check your Apache websites, your DNS and make sure that your HTTPS is set up correctly with the certificates through certbot. So itâs pretty easy to grade thereâs not a whole lot to lab five. If you get done early with it, thatâs great, just let me know and Iâll get you graded, so you can move on to lab six.
Also, at this point, weâre 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 youâre going to do is youâre 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 Iâd like you to be able to do is do the research and do some preliminary work to understand exactly what youâre proposing, what the impacts of it are, and how it would impact the larger organization that youâre proposing it within. So thatâs kind of the idea. Some projects that Iâve 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 havenât 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 youâre familiar with how we have campus setup, itâs 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. Thereâs tons of ideas out there, Iâm happy to chat with you if youâre 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 youâre familiar with. A lot of times some of the best final projects come from systems or ideas that youâre already familiar with. And then extrapolating on that to fit some of the things we did in this class.
So thatâs really all Iâve got for this week. As always, you can keep in touch Iâm 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, weâre over halfway through the semester. So it kind of feels like weâre nearing the end. Hopefully you do well in lab five. Weâve 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week 12 Announcements video for CC 510 in fall 2021. So coming up this week, youâve got lab six, thatâs 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 thereâs not a whole lot left in this class.
For lab six grading, thereâs basically four distinct parts to that lab: weâll 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. Donât install the forum, I believe itâs 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, weâre 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 weâll 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, itâs a little bit everything, itâs kind of the last few things that I wanted to cover in this class. So youâll have plenty of time to work on lab seven, itâs 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 Iâve 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 havenât come up with a good idea yet, feel free to schedule a time to chat with me about some ideas, Iâd love to throw some ideas around and see whatâs interesting to you. But the idea is I want you to demonstrate that youâve learned something in this class by applying the things youâve learned towards some sort of a final project that youâre interested in.
So to complete your final project, there are three big things that youâll turn in. The first thing youâll 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 - Iâve 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, youâre going to talk about the research youâve done in your project propose your idea. Give me a SWOT analysis, a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. And then of course, donât forget the wrap up use the outcome of your SWOT analysis to convince me as your CIO, that itâs either a good idea or a bad idea. And itâs totally okay for the idea that you propose. After you go through the SWOT analysis, you realize, thatâs a bad idea, we shouldnât 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 thatâs really all Iâll 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 youâll 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, weâll 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 youâre 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 youâve 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. Itâs, you know enough time to figure out how to install Docker, maybe set up your own Docker container or something like that. Thatâs all I want. And then as part of your live presentation, you will show me the small prototype that youâve 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, youâre 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 doesnât work well for you, you can email me for alternative arrangements, Iâm more than happy to work with that, especially if Iâve got a little bit of prior knowledge. So be thinking about your presentation. Itâs 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 everybodyâs 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 everythingâs going well hopefully for your project you can think about you know me making a PowerPoint or something or you know, Iâve had students for their final project not do any PowerPoints at all or theyâve 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week one Announcements video for CC 510. In Fall 2022, Iâm Russ Feldhausen. Iâll be your instructor for this semester, my contact information is here. Itâs also on the syllabus, itâs 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, Iâm @russfeld. Most of you have already posted Youâre 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 thereâs 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, weâre going to do live grading, so youâll schedule a time to meet with me via zoom. Usually, it only takes about 15 minutes, but Iâm 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 everythingâs working correctly. Thatâs 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, Iâm going to reuse the videos from previous summer. For other questions, Iâm 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, youâll 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 youâre interested in.
So like I said, for communication in this course, we have discord, itâs 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 youâd 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, thereâs a lot of learning that youâll have to do. And a lot of questions that I posed that are very open ended. And so youâll 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 everythingâs working before you move on. Make sure you save early and save often as youâre working with things either on your config files or by making snapshots new virtual machines. And the other big thing is, donât be afraid to ask for help, Iâm 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 thatâs a good opportunity to just take a step back, ask for help. Because I donât really expect everybody to do everything in this course without maybe getting stuck at least once in needing to ask for help. So donât be afraid to seek my help if you get stuck.
So like I said lab grading, youâll be able to schedule that via Calendly. So you can go to my Calendly link thatâs in every email signature. Itâs also on Syllabus, itâs 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 oâclock, 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. Weâre 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, itâs too late, you canât 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 youâre done with the lab, you might notice things that you did wrong as I go through the grading, but unfortunately, youâre 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 Iâve 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 Iâve got two or three people in mind that Iâd 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 thatâs really all I got for this week. Youâll expect to see an announcements video for me probably not every week in this course. Iâll 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. Iâd 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
Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CC 510 in Fall 2022. Hopefully today youâre wrapping up lab one, if you havenât already, make sure you schedule the time to meet with me to get that graded. Thatâs due tonight by 7pm. And then weâll 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 weekâs discussion, which is actually the first discussion for this semester.
So for this semester, our first speaker is Seth Galitzer, Iâve 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 bachelorâs degree from computer science at K-State. Heâs 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, youâll be able to watch it, Iâll have some questions that will have you answer. And then youâll 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, youâre 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 weâre going to delete all of that. And weâre going to do it again. But this time, weâre 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 youâre 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 youâve 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 doesnât 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. Thatâs really all Iâve 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. Iâm always happy to chat. If you get stuck on this lab, you can ask me any questions. But other than that, hopefully youâre feeling like oh, I have to do this. Again. Thatâs 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.
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 youâve watched that video and responded to those questions, you can also ask a few more questions that youâd 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 youâre 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, itâs 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 hasnât unlocked yet. So donât be afraid to go ahead and do that if youâd 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 didnât 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 thatâs 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 heâs really responsible for a lot of the big picture and long range planning stuff that goes on around K-State IT. So itâs 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, youâre 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, weâre going to spend a lot of time working on networking. So weâre going to set up some core network services on your systems. Weâre going to set static IP addresses and learn all about networking and IP addresses and the seven layer OSI model, weâre going to spend some time installing both DNS and DHCP servers, weâre 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. Thereâs 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 donât 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 youâre gonna get stuck. And thatâs okay. And so usually what I tell students, if youâre stuck, and you havenât made any forward progress for about an hour, thatâs a good opportunity to take a step back, ask me questions, see what youâre doing. And then hopefully, I can help you get past that. It generally shouldnât be that hard to do any of this. But if itâs your first time, there are an awful lot of wrong ways you can try and do it. And so youâll 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, donât be afraid to keep in touch. Thereâs 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 Iâd be happy to meet with you and chat about this class any time. So weâre at the point where hopefully now weâre going to start networking our systems, I think itâs a really exciting place to be for System Administration. Networking is really a large part of what we do today in system admin. Itâs really an important thing that makes our computers much more useful when theyâre 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week seven Announcements video for CC 510 In Fall 2022, this week, lab three is due. So hopefully youâre 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, youâll be working in lab four to turn in the week after that.
So for lab three grading, Iâve got a lot of things Iâm going to look at hopefully this is pretty clear from the lab. Basically, Iâm going to have you test your remote connections between your two VMs. Weâre going to check for your static IP on Ubuntu, weâre going to check your DNS and DHCP settings. And then Iâm 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 donât spin your wheels. If you feel like youâre not making progress and youâre stuck on something, thatâs a good chance for you to step back and ask me a question. I really donât 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 Iâd 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. Thatâs 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 youâre gonna get to interface with is Kyle Hutson. Heâs one of the Beocat admins here on campus, he helps manage his K State supercomputer which if youâve been in the engineering building, youâve seen that big supercomputer next to a lot of the classrooms. Heâs 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 youâre 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 youâd like to send to Kyle.
So for lab four, weâre going to shift gears a little bit. And now weâre going to work on authentication. In lab four, weâre going to set up our first VM for Windows Server, and then weâre going to configure it to have an active directory domain, weâll add our Windows client to that domain so that we can log in on Windows using the user accounts in the domain, weâll do kind of the same thing on Linux where weâll set up open LDAP. And weâll add a Linux client open LDAP and get that to log in there. And then weâll also configure one level of interoperability where weâll 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 doesnât work. I think itâs 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 Iâm maybe one of three that I actually get it to work the first time. And itâs 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 thatâs really whatâs 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 Iâd be happy to help you out.
Once we get past this, weâre going to go to lab five. Lab five kind of has two parts now where we start by talking about cloud resources, working DigitalOcean weâll set up SSH and firewalls and things there. And then weâll take a little side detour and talk a lot about Docker. And so weâll set up a Docker host on there. And weâll also set up a Docker reverse proxy. And so lab five kind of has two parts to it. Theyâre both pretty straightforward, but itâs a lot of new content. Itâs probably stuff that a lot of youâve never worked with before. So once we get in the lab five and a couple of weeks, youâll get to see some really exciting stuff.
Thatâs really all Iâve got for this week. As always, you can keep in touch. Weâve got good discussions on Discord. Iâve 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 youâre on campus, you can catch me there. If youâre 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. Iâd be happy to help and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks to get lab for graded
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 thatâs all working well. And then youâll also start working on lab five content this week. Next week, lab five, youâre going to be working on it, itâll be due the following Monday. And thereâs also the third discussion in this class, which becomes due very shortly.
So for lab 4 grading, for those of you that havenât done lab 4 grading, itâs really simple lab for pretty much either works or it doesnât. So what I want to see is that youâve got a Windows Server with Active Directory, and that you can log in from windows onto your Active Directory, youâll 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, thatâs really all it is. And then thereâs a couple of screenshots. Generally, it either works or it doesnât. I tried to do my best if it doesnât work to give partial credit. But if it works, thatâs 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 youâre reading the lab assignments carefully. Thereâs a lot of hints and tips in there that I dropped pretty carefully to make sure that youâve got them. Read the diagrams, if I leave any network diagrams or have any different hints on troubleshooting, donât be afraid to use your resources, a lot of times the labs have a linked resource in there. Thatâs usually the resource I used when I tried to do this myself. And then of course, if you get stuck, if youâre not making any progress or spinning your wheels for about a half hour or so thatâs a good chance to step back and ask me a question. Donât try and just force your way through it. Because sometimes it is very possible for you to reach a situation that even I canât 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 donât be afraid to reach out and ask questions if you get stuck.
So starting this week, youâre going to work on lab five, lab five, weâre moving everything to the cloud. So youâre going to create a couple of droplets on DigitalOcean, youâre going to set up SSH and firewall on those droplets, youâll set up some simple websites using either apache or nginx, youâll set up a DNS name so that youâve actually got a domain name that you can access them. And then new this past summer, I added some Docker stuff. So youâll 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, thereâs 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 donât 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 thatâs what weâre going to do right now.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. Weâve got discussions on Discord, you can schedule a one on one office hours with me, Iâm always available to help. So donât be afraid to take advantage of that. And then of course, weâre moving into the cloud. So the big thing to keep in mind is the cloud is just somebody elseâs computer. XKCD does a really good job of describing some of this. So itâs really fun to go back and read some of these comics, especially once you start to understand whatâs 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.
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 havenât already, make sure you schedule a time to get lab five graded. Youâre also should be looking at the third discussion in this class, which is due next week. And then youâll be starting on lab six with quizzes due next week and lab six itself being due the following week.
So for lab five grading, itâs 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. Weâre going to check the firewall, the date and time and a few things on both of those systems. Weâre 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, itâs great. Itâs very easy to do. If you have trouble, you can let me know. And weâll try and debug it and figure out whatâs going on.
So for lab six, weâre going to do a lot of different things on your local VMs. Weâre going to work on file servers and drive mappings. So youâll set up Samba on Linux, you know, setup file sharing in Windows, youâll 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 donât actually have to have LDAP working as long as you have the same usernames and passwords everywhere it will work, youâre also going to set up an application server. So on Windows, weâre going to install an application server in IIS and a database and some things there. on the Linux side of things, weâre going to do this in the cloud. So youâll 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. Thereâs 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 youâre 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 youâre 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 youâre going to do a SWOT analysis a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis of the idea of what youâre proposing. And then you should do some small proof of concept that shows that youâve tinkered with it a little bit. It doesnât have to be at the same scope as your final project. But it should be something in that same realm. So again, if youâre not sure what to do, feel free to chat with me and ask me questions. And Iâd be happy to help you get to a final project.
As working on this, donât forget, if you donât 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, Iâm always here to help. Otherwise, weâre getting near the end of the class. Weâve 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.
Hello, and welcome to the week 13 announcements for CC 510 in fall 2022. So this is a list of everything thatâs remaining do in this class. For the rest of the semester, weâve got lab six thatâs due today, youâve got a discussion thatâs due after Thanksgiving, your final project proposal is due after Thanksgiving. And then we have lab seven, discussion, five. And the final project Iâll do right around finals week. So thereâs really not a whole lot left in this class. As long as youâre 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 youâll be getting graded. Today, youâve got a Windows file server and an Ubuntu file server that youâll be setting up in your virtual machines, youâre also going to have a Windows web application thatâs set up on your Windows Server in your virtual machine. And then youâll 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 everythingâs working correctly. So if itâs working and you know itâs working, youâre probably be fine. If youâre having issues, I can work with you to see whatâs 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 weâll spend a little bit of time playing around with backups and restoring from backups. Weâll spend a little time doing some monitoring. And weâll 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 heâs 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 youâve 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 youâre 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, youâre 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 youâre 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. Youâll also give me a presentation, itâll 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 youâve analyzed this project well, and that youâve leveraged the things that youâve 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. Itâs not meant to be that much. But I at least want you to get something hands on with something that we maybe havenât 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 Iâm 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. Weâve gotten discussions on Discord, youâve got office hours, thereâs 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 youâll probably end up with a PowerPoint or two. So donât 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.
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 youâre working on that final project proposal. Itâs just a short one page that explains your project and kind of tells me youâre 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 weâll talk about lab seven and just a bit. And then on finals week, thereâs a discussion due on Monday and your final project is due on Friday of finals week. And then finally, donât 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 itâs working. And for part four, you submit your GitLab repository, youâll need to add me to that so that I can see it, my username is the same as my email address. And then youâll also send me your URL of where it gets posted. And then for extra credit, youâll 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 youâll need to complete. The big thing that youâll turn in is the written report, there is a template Iâd like you to use that kind of outlines the different sections that youâll 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 youâll basically do is research your project proposal and then do a SWOT analysis. When I grade these, I usually look at two things. Iâm 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 thereâs anything I need to see or understand or any charts that might be useful, you can include those. The second part youâll do is a presentation, your presentation is 15 to 30 minutes, itâs basically going over whatâs 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 thatâs the big thing there. The other part of your final project is a small prototype, it should be very easy, itâs 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, youâll just show your prototype as a short little demo. Thatâs 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 itâs recorded, I want you to schedule time to meet with me for q&a. The q&a should be after youâve 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 youâll run into is because Iâm 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 youâve got your time booked, regardless of what youâre 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, weâll 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. Itâs 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 Iâve 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. Iâm 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 thereâs anything wrong with their grades, we can get that fixed ASAP.
Other than that, this is probably the last Announcements video Iâm 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. Iâm available all the time. Iâm happy to help answer questions. Itâs been a real pleasure having you all in this class. And so I hope things go well. But now youâre at the end hopefully feel like youâve solved some problems and youâre youâre cheering at the end of the semester. Youâve only got a few things left in this class. But as long as things go well hopefully you will continue to enjoy what youâre 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.