July 6, 2021
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week five announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So this week, you’ve got lab four, it’s actually due tomorrow, which is Wednesday by 7pm. So hopefully you’re getting things done with lab four. Also on Wednesday, you’ll have your question responses for last week’s discussion and the questions for this upcoming week’s discussion due that night by 11:59pm. Our speaker this week is Hunter Guthrie. I’ll talk a little bit more about him in just a second. And then we’re going to switch back to Mondays at 7pm. From here on out. So next week, lab five is due on Monday. So it’s kind of a quick turnaround. But I don’t think it will be a big problem as we talked about lab five.
So for lab four grading, there are a couple of things I’m really looking for on the Windows side, you should have Windows Server installed, you should have an Active Directory configured with a user and a group in it. And then your Windows client should be able to log in via Active Directory. On the Ubuntu side, you should have an open LDAP server installed with a user and a group created. And then your Ubuntu client should be able to log in against open LDAP. And then finally, you should have another Ubuntu client either another VM or a snapshot in the same VM that’s able to login via your windows Active Directory as well. So it sounds a lot simpler than it is. But it’s really just very few outcomes that we’re looking for in this particular lab.
So as before, to be successful in this class, make sure you’re reading all the assignments carefully. Make sure you’re looking at all the posted information, including the diagram for this lab, there’s a really nice networking diagram that you can check out. Feel free to use the resources that I made available, including all of the links on all of the pages, those are usually really helpful. If you find a broken link, let me know you can get some of those bug bounty extra credit points for that. And finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re sitting there spinning your wheels trying to work on the same problem for longer than about a half hour or so that’s a good opportunity for you to take a step back and ask me questions. However, that means you have to start in these labs a little bit earlier, because you won’t have a ton of time to ask me questions and get a response, especially on Tuesday or Wednesday, right before things are due.
So our speaker this week is Hunter Guthrie. Hunter Guthrie is officially his title is the plant system administrator. He works for Evergy. And specifically he works at the Wolf Creek generating plant, which if you’re unfamiliar with the area is the nuclear power plant that’s a little bit south of Topeka. And so he’s a former CIS 527 student he was in my class several years ago. And he now works in a very highly secure industry working as a system administrator for a nuclear power plant. And so he has some really interesting insights on system administration in that particular field. And hopefully, he does a really good job telling you all about his daily routines.
So next week, you’re going to start working on lab five, lab five, we’re going to be taking things into the cloud. So for lab five, you’re going to create two droplets on digitalocean, you’re going to set up SSH, so you can connect to your droplets and connect between the droplets, you’ll set up firewalls on your droplets. And we’re just going to start with simple Apache websites. The other big thing you’re going to do is create a DNS name that will point to those droplets. So if you don’t already have your own domain name, now’s a good chance to get one Lab five does require you to sign up for a couple of things online. If you haven’t used these tools before, you can go to education.github.com/pack and try and register for the GitHub student developer pack. Hopefully you did that already. I think I instructed you earlier in the class. But if I forgot, now’s the chance to do it. With the GitHub pack, you get $100 of free digitalocean credit if you’re a new digitalocean user, if you go to Namecheap through the nc.me domain, you can get a $1 DNS name for students. If you haven’t used those tools before, and you have trouble getting the pack, let me know, especially for digitalocean I think I can give you referral credits, I think there are lots of signup codes that you can get. So if you have trouble getting those, basically, if you’ve never used digitalocean, or name cheap before, you should be able to do so for free. At worst, the total cost for this class is $11, you’ll have two digitalocean droplets that are $5 a month will be done in a month. And your name cheap domain is $1. So at worst, it will be $11. Hopefully that works. But if it is trouble, let me know. And I will help you out with that. I also do have a quick caveat for this lab. If you choose not to use any of these cloud resources, that is your right you don’t have to do that. If you want let me know and I will come up with alternative arrangements for you. Generally, I will have you do basically the same things in your VMware VMs as we were doing in the cloud. But I really think in this class, it’s useful for you to get some experience in a real cloud. And I found that digitalocean is the easiest one to use. And so that’s what we’re going to do. I have had several students asked me why we don’t use AWS, Amazon Web Services in this class, and it’s mainly because of ease of use. I find that going from VMware to digitalocean is a little bit smoother of a transition. And then once you’re comfortable with cloud concepts in digitalocean, making the shift from there to Amazon Web Services isn’t too much more. But Amazon Web Services, AWS uses a slightly different model. And I found that students going directly into AWS it, it takes a little bit more work. So that’s why we do digitalocean I think it’s a good choice for this class. So that’s all I got for this week.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. I’m on Discord. As always, I’m also watching my emails, so you can get a hold of me anyway, that anytime that way, we have our zoom discussions every Thursday at 330. Those are good times to ask questions of our guests, but also of me, I also host tea time office hours, I’ll have tea time today at 330. So you can catch me there. We’ll also start doing Fridays at 1030. In a couple weeks, we still have two more weeks of teacher training. And then of course, you can schedule a one on one office hours with me using the exact same calendly link that you use to schedule your grading times. You can schedule a time with me anytime throughout the week when you have questions.
So that’s all I’ve got for this week for the cloud. I’m going to leave you with this quick XKCD comic. I think it’s also in my slides. But it’s really fun thinking about the cloud in terms of it’s really just somebody else’s computer. And so in theory, there could just be one computer out there. That is the cloud for everyone else. So that’s all I’ve got for this week. Good luck on finishing lab four. Good luck on lab five. If you have any questions, let me know and otherwise I look forward to seeing you when we do grading