Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week two announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, don’t forget today it’s Monday. So lab 1 is due by today at 7pm. However you do you need to schedule to have it graded and most of my grading times are before 5pm. So make sure if you haven’t done that yet, you need to schedule a time to grade ASAP on calendly so that I can meet with you via zoom and grade your lab. Remember, if you work during the day on eight to five normal hours, you can email me and make arrangements to have your lab graded after 5pm but only by email beforehand. So don’t email me tomorrow or the next day letting me know that you had to work today. That’s something you need to plan ahead to take care of. This Wednesday, there are a couple of things due Wednesday by 11:59 you should do your Discord intro so by then you’ll need to join the discord server and introduce yourself and as soon as you do that, I’ll respond. And I will put in the points for that. When you introduce yourself. Don’t be afraid to you’re actually encouraged to ask me a question. Don’t be afraid to ask me anything that you want to know. I’m really happy to answer any questions you have about myself, my background, this class, anything that you want. So that’s do this Wednesday. The other thing that’s due this Wednesday is you need to submit two questions for our guest speaker that’s coming in on Thursday. Seth Galitzer I’ll talk about him in just a second. But you need to submit two questions on canvas as part of that as well. And that’s due by Wednesday night 11:59. Then on Thursday, we have our speaker Seth Galitzer he’s coming in at 3:30 on Thursday via zoom. If you can be there live, that would be fantastic. We’d love to have a really good discussion with him so that he feels like it’s a good use of his time. But if you can’t make it because of any other conflicts, you can watch the video afterwards and write a little written prompt and you’ll be able to get your points that way. And then finally, don’t forget you should start on lab to lab two is due next week on Monday again at 7pm. The nice thing about lab two as I’ll talk about in a second. We don’t have to do live grading with that.
So don’t forget one of the things I’d like you to do is introduce yourself on Discord. discord is a great place for you to ask quick questions as you’re working on lab get some clarification. Usually if I’m sitting at my computer or even if I have my phone with me, I will try and respond to the discord questions as soon as I can. But I don’t guarantee any particular response time on Discord. so be warned. If you post something on discord and it’s not answered within a certain amount of time, feel free to email me emails guaranteed will get a response within one business day. You can also use discord to chat with other students. I’ll probably use it throughout the semester to post news and current events and things that we can discuss there. I’ll also post a lot of reminders there. I won’t spam you with emails from Canvas on little simple reminders about upcoming things. But I will do that on Discord. So if you want some reminders, joining discord is a great way to do that. And finally, don’t forget to join discord you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu Follow the instructions there it will invite your discord account to join the discord server that we have, and it will set everything up for you.
So our speaker this week is Seth Galitzer. Seth Galitzer is the computer science system administrator. And he’s been in that role since I believe 2006, which is when I was an undergraduate here at K state. He actually has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from K-State. And he’s worked for a couple of departments at K-State but computer science since about 2006. He currently is the person that manages all the computer science systems and labs in our department. So pretty much every computer science system you interact with is under Seth’s purview. He’s got a few students to work for him as well, his counterpart, Earl Harris, retired last year. So it’s now just Seth that’s in charge of a lot of this guy. And he comes with a wealth of knowledge from the world of system administration. He really is probably one of the most knowledgeable people you’ll get to talk to this semester. So please come with questions about how the computer science systems work, how it’s architected, how you maintain a set of systems to allow students to learn and play around with tools like Linux, and MySQL, and web servers, all on a very tight budget. So I hope you look forward to look talking to Seth here on Thursday.
So coming up this week is lab to lab two, you’re basically going to redo lab one, but this time, you’re going to set up your VMs using puppet instead of doing it manually. So for lab two, the short version is you’ll reinstall the operating system, usually on a new virtual machine, you can delete the VMs that you’ve used for lab one, as soon as they’re greater than you’re happy with your grade. But you basically reinstall the base operating system, install puppet. And then as soon as you get to that point in the setup, make a snapshot of your VM. And the reason I have you do that is the rest of the lab is going to be writing a puppet manifest to do things like setting up the user accounts and files and installing software and then you test that manifest by applying it and then if it works or doesn’t work, you can restore back to that state. snapshot before you’ve ever applied the manifest. to test it. Again, if you don’t make a snapshot, and you want to undo some of the changes your manifest does, you’re probably going to have to reinstall your operating system. And that’s a really, really tough thing to do when you’re in a hurry. So make sure you make that snapshot when it tells you to in lab two, so that you can roll back to it as you work on your manifests. The other big thing I can tell you about your manifests, try and keep it simple, do things such as puppet resource where you can actually query the setup of a system. So one thing I tell students to do is if you want to create a user account, manually make the user account and then use puppet resource to query what it looks like. And you can use that output in your puppet manifest by tweaking it a little bit. So use the tools at your disposal. And then also bear in mind that at least my model solutions are pretty short. In total, each file is about 200 lines of code or less. So two files, you’ll have less than 400 lines of code total. So try not to make this too complicated. I’ve had some students get really stuck in the weeds trying to make this super fancy, it really doesn’t have to be very fancy, it just needs to get the work done, and work really well and be very well tested.
Other than that, don’t be afraid to keep in touch in this class. We’ll have good discussions on Discord. We have our zoom discussion times with our guest speakers starting this Thursday at 3:30. So make sure you get that on your calendar and plan to attend. I also host Tea Time office hours every Tuesday at 3:30. We also have a time Friday at 10:30. However, for the next five weeks, I’ll be doing training sessions on Friday mornings. So I’m guessing tea time office hours will start late if they started all unless somebody else jumps on. So hopefully we’ll have some times on Friday. But definitely Tuesdays at 3:30 I will always be on. And then of course you can always schedule a one on one times with me via calendly. So jump on my calendar, grab a time if you want to meet with me in person that way. So this is usually the response I get when students start working on lab one, or lab two is they feel like oh, I have to redo lab one. And yes, that’s kind of the point I am having you redo lab one. But I’m trying to show you the power of using tools such as puppet to automatically configure your machines instead of manually configure them. And I guarantee on Thursday when Seth comes here, if you talk and ask him about how he uses chef to maintain all of the computers in our computer labs, you’ll very quickly find how useful tools such as that are. So I hope you find this lab interesting. This is really the last of the setup labs. And then we’ll go into lab three and lab four, where we’re working off a lot on core networking technologies and things such as active directories and LDAP for authentication. So good luck on lab two. I look forward to seeing you this week when we grade lab one. And as always, if you have questions, let me know.