June 28, 2021
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week four announcements for cis 527 in summer 2021. I’m 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, we’ve got lab three, it’s due tonight by 7pm. This lab does require live grading. So if you haven’t 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 you’ll 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, we’ll be working on lab four, which will be due the following Monday. Actually, I think it’s 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. You’ll 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 we’ll take a look at your DNS server settings. We’ll also take a look at the lookups for DNS and make sure that that’s working. And we’ll check the SNMP and Wireshark. Mostly I’ll 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 haven’t 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. Don’t forget, when you’re reading the assignments, make sure you read them very carefully. I’ve 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, there’s 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, don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re stuck on something, the one thing I don’t want you to do in this class is sit there and spin your wheels. If you’ve spent more than an hour or half an hour or so googling and really working hard on a problem, and you’re not making any progress. That’s the time to take a step back and ask me for help. Because there are situations you can get into where systems aren’t working the way they should, or you’ve made a bad assumption or something didn’t install correctly. And I can help you pinpoint whether that’s the case or not. And whether it’s something you can actually try and get past or if it’s something you need to start over. So big thing is don’t be afraid to ask me questions in this class, I’m more than willing to help answer them.
So our speaker this Thursday are the two Beocat system admins, Adam Tygart and Kyle Hutson, they’ve managed K-State supercomputer they’ve 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. They’re 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 it’s 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 they’re really a wealth of knowledge, I hope that you enjoy talking to them.
So coming up this week, we’ve got lab four. Lab four is all about working with Active Directory and open LDAP to create authentication systems. So you’ll install a Windows Server VM, you’ll configure Active Directory, open LDAP, you’ll configure clients to log in against each of those. And then we’re also going to configure a little bit of interoperability so that you’re 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 you’re 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 doesn’t work.
So that’s all I’ve got for this week. As always, please feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got good discussions going on Discord, you’re more than welcome to join and chat with me there. We’ll 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, we’re still doing just Tuesdays at 330. However, in a couple weeks, once I get done with my teacher training program, we’ll 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 that’s all I got this week. I hope that this week as you’re going through working with Active Directory and open LDAP, you don’t 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 doesn’t work. And you don’t know why. And it’s almost easier to start over than to try and figure out why it doesn’t work in the first place. So if you have to roll back and try again, don’t 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.