July 12, 2021
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week six announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So at this point, you should be working on lab five, which is due tonight by 7pm. I see I’ve got meetings for most everybody already on my calendar. So that’s great. It looks like everybody’s keeping up so far. Then we’ve got our speaker coming up, we didn’t have a speaker last week, we’ve rescheduled Hunter to the week after this one. So you don’t have a response due this week. But you do have questions for our next speaker, which is going to be Sarah. She’s going to be speaking this week. So don’t forget to get those questions turned in. And the next week, you’ll be working on lab six, which is also due by Monday at 7pm.
So for lab five grading today, there are a few things I want you to demonstrate. Usually if everything’s working, this takes less than five minutes, basically will have you SSH to your front end. And then I will also use the grading key to SSH to your front end, we’ll have you check a couple of things they’re around your firewall will SSH to your back end we’ll check the firewall and stuff there. And then lastly, I’ll use basically I’ll just try and load your website using the domain name you give me. And as long as it loads and it has HTTPS and everything you should be good to go. Usually doesn’t take too long as long as everything’s working. But if something’s not working, it’s really important to get this lab figured out because it really builds into the next two labs that you’ll be working on for the rest of this class.
So our speaker this Thursday is Sarah Allen. Sarah is a system administrator for McCown Gordon, a construction company that has an office in Manhattan. They do a lot of construction around campus and in the Manhattan area, as well as here in Kansas City. She also has a former 527 student of mine, and is probably the closest to what you’d see in an industrial helpdesk and support environment. She is basically the frontline support for their construction company. And so she would have a lot of insight into what it’s like to be in that part of the industry.
So coming up, this week, we’ll be working on lab six, which is all about file servers and application servers on the file server side on your VMs. Locally, you’ll be creating a file server on both Ubuntu and on your Windows Server. And then you’ll be setting up some automatic drive mappings on the windows side you’ll use the Group Policy editor to set up a group policy so that those drives automatically mount there. On the Linux side, you’ll edit a couple of config files to have them mount either automatically via fstab, or you’ll use an XML file to set up some auto mounting there. The Ubuntu part is kind of tricky, but like some of the previous labs, I walked through almost the entire process in the video. So just follow along very closely. And hopefully you can get that working. The second part of lab six is setting up some web application servers. On the Linux side, you’ll do this in the cloud, what you’ll actually do is install WordPress from the zip file that you get from WordPress. And you’ll set it up so that the WordPress website runs on your front end server, but it connects to the database that’s on your back end server. And this is a little tricky the first time you’ve done it, but hopefully you can get it working. On the windows side you’ll install probably blog engine dotnet, which is pretty simple you just extracted but then you have to set up a few things on the windows side to get the certificates and all the auto forwarding to work. But again, I give most of this in the lab. So hopefully a lot of lab six is just following along and getting everything installed and working correctly.
Finally, we are down… it’s week six, we got two and a half weeks left. So the last thing you need to be thinking about in this course is your final project. Your final project topic I believe is due at the end of next week. So make sure you get that thought out. The whole idea behind the final project is to build something or fix something that you’re working with, it’s to gain a small amount of hands on experience in this course, it could be building a web resource for a new startup company setting up laptops for a school central authentication system and helpdesk system, discussing whether you want to use thin clients or thick clients and labs. There are tons and tons of ideas. If you need some help, feel free to chat with me for ideas, I’m happy to bounce my ideas around give you some things that are floating around in my mind that you might want to work on. The whole idea for the final project is it is mostly a thought exercise. I don’t intend you to do a whole lot with it. But I want you to sit down and think about how you would set these things up, do some research as to what would be the industry standard way to do this, what would be some different options that you have. And then there is one small part where I want you to implement some little tiny piece of what you’re doing. For example, if you’re talking about building a new web resource for a startup and you think that it would work best on AWS, your little part that you could do is actually set up a server on AWS just to get a little experience working with AWS. If you’re talking about centralized authentication, you might look at installing something like a CAS server, a central authentication system server that authenticates against LDAP or active directory. For thin clients versus thick clients. You can look at some of the management tools for thin clients. There’s all sorts of things out there. You don’t have to do a whole lot But I want you to at least do something that fits with your final project. And then of course, your final project itself is mostly just the presentation and the write up that you will send to me. And that is due by the end of the semester, which is the end of not the week after next, but the week after that one. So end of July.
Finally, I had a couple of questions from students, if you’re having trouble getting the GitHub education pack, especially if your GitHub is not signed up via your .edu email address, you can go directly to digitalocean. Try digitalocean com slash free trial offer and get $100 credits there. If you created a new digitalocean account, I think you might be able to talk to their support folks and get them to apply that offer to your account. For name cheap. If you need a domain name, you can go to nc.me. And as long as you sign up with your .edu email address, you can get a free .me domain for a year. So you can bypass the GitHub education pack completely by just going to those two websites, and getting all the things you need.
Other than that, as always, don’t be afraid to keep in touch. I’m always on Discord. You can email me You can set up times with me via calendly. We have our zoom discussions on Thursdays at 330. I’ve got tee time office hours, Tuesdays at 330. And this week will be the last week that we won’t do Friday. Starting next week. We’ll try and do Friday again. So there’s lots of ways you can get help and ask questions in this course if you run in any trouble.
Other than that, we are nearing the end of the course. And so now’s the time to be thinking about getting your final project done getting things wrapped up making sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row so that you’re ready at the end of the semester to get that turned in. If you have any questions please let me know. Otherwise, I look forward to working with you and seeing your final projects. Good luck.