July 13, 2020
YouTube VideoResources
Video Script
Happy Monday morning I’m coming to you once again live and unscripted for our week six announcements video in CIS 527. I apologize for my Coronavirus hair. I haven’t gotten a haircut since March. So it’s definitely been interesting doing some of these videos and watching me change over the semester. I hope everybody’s doing well with the pandemic. I know it’s really tough right now. I’m living in Kansas City, and it’s really crazy right here. So I hope everybody’s staying safe and staying healthy.
Okay, so where we’re at - lab four was due last Friday. I think last time I checked about half the class had that turned in. So if you don’t have lab four graded, go ahead and schedule a time with either BreAnn or myself very soon so we can get that taken care of. Don’t forget the discussion response from the week four discussion with the CDC infrastructure folks is due today. So make sure you get that uploaded by 11:59 tonight. This week’s discussion actually had to be moved to tomorrow because of a scheduling conflict with our guest. So today at 4pm, I’ll be doing a quick live office hours from four to five. You can use the same link that we use for the discussion room to join those office hours. Feel free to come in, hang out as questions, discuss stuff, share ideas. I’m just going to be there hanging out and hopefully having a good time. So please feel free to join me today at 4pm.
So our week five discussion is actually tomorrow at 4pm. I hope folks can join. We actually have an industry person coming and joining us, Ethan from Cerner. He works in their, I believe it’s called Cerner Works. It may have changed his name recently. But they do a lot of system administration stuff for Cerner, which is a large company. And then we also have lab five and lab six, which are both due this Friday.
So some lab five tips. Basically, you’re going to be building virtual machines in the cloud. So if you haven’t yet, you’ll need to sign up for a DigitalOcean account. When you sign up for a new account, you should get $100 in free credit. If not talk to one of us. We have referral links that we can get you One of the trickiest things about lab five is setting up your SSH keys. The thing to keep in mind is you create the SSH key on the source that you’re logging in from, and then you copy that key to the destination. On Windows, I really don’t recommend using PuTTY anymore. You can get SSH installed via the Windows subsystem for Linux or in PowerShell. Or you can use any of your Ubuntu VMs from earlier labs. But I really recommend avoiding PuTTY at this point, it just… it isn’t as good as it should be. On your host, you’ll also need to configure your firewall and then you’ll set up some virtual hosts and certificates using Apache and certbot. Generally, lab five doesn’t take too long. It’s just a lot of reading and getting through the material the first time but the actual lab content shouldn’t take all that long to get completed.
Then on lab six, you’re going to do three big things. In your droplets on DigitalOcean you’ll create a front end and back end server using WordPress usually, I highly recommend installing WordPress from the zip file. There are tons and tons of ways you Install WordPress. But by far the easiest is downloading the zip file, extracting it on your frontend, configuring the database section of it to point to your back end, and then you should be good to go. You’ll also set up a file server in Windows and some group policy in Windows to automatically map those file shares on your Windows clients. And then you’ll also set up a file server in Samba - generally just editing the Samba config file is enough. And then you’ll add a couple of automounts on your Ubuntu clients so that it mounts those Samba files automatically for you.
Also, please keep in mind the final project - your proposal for the final project is due a week from Friday on the 24th. So you need to start thinking about that soon. Remember, the idea for the final project is to build something or fix something that is vaguely IT related. It doesn’t have to be completely IT. Some things you could think of, for example, you could build out a web resource for a new startup company. The Animoto case study that we look at in lab five is a really great way to think about that. You could think about setting up laptops for a school. What if K-State orders 100 new laptops? How would you use tools like Ansible or Puppet to automatically provision and set up those laptops. If you work for a small company, you could look at how you would design central authentication for that company. So all the computers use either Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP. And the resource sharing you can get with that, maybe even looking at VPN software, so you could connect to that network from remotely. More related to K-State. Think about the computer labs we have in 1114 and 1116. We have an example of a thin client lab that uses remote desktop to connect to big beefy Remote Desktop servers, or thick client labs like 1116, where each lab computer is its own fully powerful desktop. And so you could look at some of the cost benefit analysis of that. I’m sure Seth would be more than willing to talk to you about that as well. And so finally, on the final project, if you don’t have any good ideas, feel free to talk to either BreAnn or I - we’ve got some ideas we can share. We can kind of chew on things back and forth and see what’s interesting to you and how we can fit that into something that makes a final project. So the best thing I can say is don’t make this harder than it is we want to find something that is interesting and exciting to you and something that you would be excited to work on and try and build into a final project.
Other than that, here’s my usual slide. Don’t be afraid to keep in touch. There’s great discussions happening on Piazza. We have discussions on Zoom. We have our tea time office hours every Tuesday at 330 on Friday at 1030. We’d love to see you there. BreAnn and I both hold one on one office hours via zoom, all you have to do is schedule on our Calendly links. And then I also live on the Rocket.chat server. We may also set up a team’s server just to try that out for the last couple weeks of the semester.
But other than that, we’re getting close to the end of the semester, we only have three weeks left. So now’s the time to start making sure you’re getting everything taken care of as we get toward the end of the semester. If you have any questions, let us know. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck and we will keep in touch.