July 7, 2020
Resources
Video Script
Good morning and welcome to the week five announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted once again from my dining room just to cover a little bit about what’s going on this week in CIS 527. So first off, lab four, the due date was moved back one day, hopefully everybody saw that announcement last week. So it is now due tomorrow, which is Tuesday by 7pm. So hopefully either today or tomorrow, you’re ready to schedule a grading time with either BreAnn or myself. The week three response is still due today by 11:59pm. So make sure you get that in. Our week for discussion is also today at 4pm. We’re going to have some students from the Cyber Defense Club at K-State talking about their infrastructure that they use for training and getting ready for their cyber defense competitions. And then also be aware that lab five and lab six, we have grouped them together and both of them are due one week from Friday. That should be Friday. I believe it’s the 17th of July.
So, coming up next, we’ve got lab four that’s due tomorrow. We talked about this last week, there are four or five VMs. The one thing that we have updated, there was some confusion about NETBIOS domain names. So check the Piazza post on that; there’s a pretty lengthy post Piazza post going into some of those discussions. I’ve worked with a couple of students that have had some issues on lab four, but we seem to be able to resolve them pretty quickly. So hopefully, things are going well on lab four. But if you’re having trouble, please talk to us and let us know if you have any questions.
For lab five, you’re going to be creating actual cloud resources using DigitalOcean. So you’ll do things like configure SSH, set up a domain name, set up TLS certificates, virtual hosts, load balancers, everything that you need to run a real live website out on the web.
Because of that, we’re going to be using some cloud resources that you may or may not have used before. If you haven’t already, you should sign up for the GitHub developer pack at the URL at the top of this slide. It’s a really great way to get lots of discounts online. Overall, in this lab, we’re going to use DigitalOcean. So we’ll need two DigitalOcean droplets that run about $5 a month. We’ll also use a load balancer just for lab five, the load balancer itself runs $10 a month, but you’ll use it for a day. So your your total cost should be less than $1. We’ll also use a domain from NameCheap which you can go to nc.me and get a free domain for the first year if you’re a student. For DigitalOcean. If you don’t already have a DigitalOcean account either through the education.github.com you can get a DigitalOcean account or if you go directly to DigitalOcean, right now they’re having a deal where you can get $100 free credit if you sign up a new account there. So basically either way you should be able to get this done for free. But if you have used DigitalOcean before and you have used your NameCheap free domain before, at most, your total cost should be about $15 or less to yourself.
That said if you are uncomfortable using cloud resources, or don’t have the ability to do this, please let me know so that we can make alternative arrangements. In years past, I’ve worked with students to do these either directly on their VMs, or use some of the cloud resources that I use, just so that your cost and your trouble is a little bit easier. But if you can, I highly recommend going ahead and doing this lab as it’s written, it’s a really great way to experience working with cloud resources and real domains and real TLS certificates. And so I really recommend doing it the way that I’ve got it configured.
After lab five, then you’ll start working on lab six. Lab six mostly deals with file servers and application servers and some of the things around those. Specifically for the cloud, you’ll set up both a front end and a back end system. So you’ll have your front end with your web interface your back end with your database. And with the file servers, we’ll actually learn how to automatically map those resources to our different virtual machines.
Lastly, if you have any questions, don’t forget, please keep in touch in this class; you can join the discussion on Piazza; you can join our weekly zoom discussions. We have tea time office hours twice a week, you can find that also on Piazza. I do one on one office hours, BreAnn does one on one office hours. And I’m also available on the CS Rocket.chat server, which is chat.cs ksu.edu. Basically, if you have any questions, concerns, comments in this class, the number one thing you can do is reach out and ask for help.
I always get really sad when I see students that fall behind in this class and I reach out to them. And they just… they haven’t come to me and asked for help. And so I always want to remind you that it isn’t online class. As much as I really want to be able to help you, it really depends on you as a student to reach out to me and let me know what I can help with. Otherwise, I just don’t know where my resources are best spent. So if you have questions or concerns, reach out to me anytime, let me know and I’d be happy to work with you to get those things resolved.
Other than that, good luck on lab four. Hopefully you’re getting it finished up today. Good luck on labs five and six, which are due in two weeks. If you have any questions on either of those, let me know and hopefully I will see a lot of you today at four o’clock. So have a good day.