July 20, 2020
YouTube VideoResources
Video Script
Good morning everyone and welcome to our week seven announcements video. I’m coming to you live and unscripted here from kind of a rainy Kansas City this morning. So let’s get right to it. First off, here’s where we’re at. Last Friday, lab five and six were due. So if you haven’t turned in and gotten graded for lab five and lab six, you should be doing so really quickly. Last I checked, I think we had maybe half the class done with lab five and a few people were through lab six. So hopefully we get that caught up very soon. Also, don’t forget the discussion response for week five, Ethan at Cerner, is due tomorrow. I apologize. I forgot to get the questions uploaded last week, but I uploaded them this morning. So that is available for you. So don’t forget to finish that discussion response by tomorrow. Today we have a special guest for our discussion. We have Dr. Gary Pratt. He is K-State’s CIO who’s going to be joining us and hopefully he’ll tell us a lot about K-State IT, the infrastructure we have at K-State, the future of IT at K-State, and kind of his top down perspective on how things are going. So I’m hoping that’s going to be a really good discussion. I hope you can join us. Lab seven. The last lab in this class is due this Friday, and we’ll discuss lab seven here in a bit. Also, don’t forget your proposals for the final project are due this Friday. So be thinking about your final projects if you haven’t done that. And lastly, a quick reminder, please make sure you check Calendly for our availability, both BreAnn and myself. BreAnn is starting a job next Monday and so her availability goes way down after this week. And actually toward the end of this week, it may be a little short. So please take a look at the calendly links for both BreAnn and I make sure you’re aware of our availability. And most most of the time I will be available, BreAnn will be available for parts of this week, but then starting next week will be much less available. So just be aware of that.
So coming up next is lab seven. Some quick tips for lab seven. Each part of that lab is self contained. So you can jump back and forth between the parts and they really shouldn’t impact anything that you’re doing. The task one, the windows backups task does take time. Depending on the specs of your machine, it can take a couple hours to do a Windows backup. So make sure you’re aware of that. Also, there’s some good information in that lab for either adding a second hard disk to your VMs for task one, or you can add flash drive or something to your machine and use that for your backups. Either one of those work. Task four is building an ELK stack, that’s something I added new this year. To do that, you’re going to have to give one of your Ubuntu VMs four gigabytes of RAM in order to handle the ELK stack. If that doesn’t work, let us know. It’s something I’m trying this year. So if students have a lot of trouble with that task, we may change it. For task five, the webhooks part, make sure you read the hook examples link that’s below that.
And finally for lab seven, we’ve modified it a bit so we can do on offline grading. So to get graded for lab seven, you can still contact either BreAnn or I through Calendly and we’ll grade stuff live for you in person. However, if you’d like to get graded offline, here are the things you need to submit for each task. For task one, we need four or five screenshots that are described in the assignment. For task two, you’ll submit a zip file of your backup and a readme that describes how your backup is built. For task three, you’ll send us the URL of either your Munin or your Ganglia instance. And bear in mind, those instances should so show data from both frontend and backend. For task four, we just want you to install the ELK stack and get us a screenshot of Metricbeat showing data from your VMs. And then finally, for task five, you’ll need to add us to your GitLab repo on the K-State CS GitLab server, and then send us the URL for where that repo is on your frontend or backend, probably front end, so that we can see the changes that we make to that repo.
So some quick notes about the final project. You’ve seen this slide a couple of times, already. So basically the idea of a final project is to build something or fix something IT related. There’s a few different ideas here, setting up web resources for a startup, building laptops for school, central authentication, thin clients vs. thick clients. There’s tons of ideas, maybe even today during the live discussion, you might get some ideas from Gary Pratt. So please be thinking about ideas. If you’re not sure you can schedule a Calendly time to chat with either BreAnn and I, we have some really good ideas just kind of stored up that students have mentioned over the years that we can share with you as possible good ideas for a final project. But bear in mind your proposal is due Friday. The proposal is super short. It’s usually half a page or less, its just enough description so that we can understand what your project is so that we can approve it so you can work on it next week.
So the final project presentation is coming up. You should schedule that for sometime next week, the last week of class, I highly recommend reserving your time now. There are 20 people in this class. Which means that if each person needs a half hour, that’s going to take 10 hours out of my time, which means that immediately not everybody is going to fit on Friday. It will be some Thursday some Friday. So schedule your time now - go to my calendar for Thursday or Friday of next week and grab your time. You should schedule 30 minutes per team member so if you’re on a team have to you’ll schedule an hour. If you need alternative arrangements, if you work during the days and you need to present in the evenings or something, contact me as soon as possible so we can make alternative arrangements. I’m trying the best I can to keep my calendar somewhat free for those two days. But there are always things that come up at the last minute so if you can schedule your times now I know that I can work around those.
A couple other quick administrivia things - tevals will be sent out next week. You should get an email from the teval system next Monday encouraging you to fill that out. Please take the time to fill out the teval and respond honestly with your thoughts and your feedback on this class. As you hopefully are aware all comments and feedback are welcome. I do change this class from time to time. And BreAnn and I have been having really good discussions about the implementation of deadlines in this class and some of the changes we want to make going forward into next summer that I think are going to make this class even better, but we really welcome your comments and feedback. You can comment on the teval, which is anonymous. You’re also welcome to contact me directly. If you want to chat with me and share some ideas that you have directly with me. I totally welcome that. And lastly, keep an eye on your grades.
For final grades, you should check Canvas anytime right now and look at the gradebook. As far as I know the grades you see in Canvas are correct. If you have any questions or concerns about those let me know as soon as possible so I can address that. It’s much much easier to fix grading problems now than it is Friday or the Monday after the end of the semester when I’m trying to submit grades to KSIS. So please make sure you’re checking your grades and let me know if there are any discrepancies you see as soon as possible.
Other than that, the usual keep in touch slide. We have great discussions going on Piazza. We have good Zoom discussions; I meet with students, it seems like almost every day now, which is fantastic. Don’t forget, we have our tea time office hours, which are Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. It’s a great way to just get together and hang out with fellow computer science students and some of our faculty. We really do have a lot of fun during those times. I hope you join us. You can still schedule one on one office hours, I’m still on Rocket.chat. And we have our live discussion today at four o’clock with Gary Pratt. So tons of ways that you can get in touch with us in this class.
Other than that, we are almost there - we’re at the end of the semester. So we’re getting things wrapped up pretty quickly, hopefully get through labs five, six and seven very easily. If you do have questions or concerns, let me know. And then I look forward to seeing your final projects. The final projects in this class are always very interesting and I find it really exciting to see what students are thinking about. So good luck this week, and I will look forward to hearing from you soon.