June 2, 2021

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, these announcements videos are usually much more unscripted than the other videos I do for this course. But I think it’s kind of fun to do these videos just so I can chat with you a little bit and tell you about what’s going on in the course. So once again, I’m Russell Feldhausen. I’m your instructor for this course My contact information is here on this slide. I work remotely from Kansas City. And so I’m not usually on campus very often. But I’m almost always at my computer and I’m on discord and watching my email throughout the day. So I should be pretty easy to get ahold of probably email is the best way to get a hold of me. But if you have short questions and want to chat with me on discord, I’ll try and keep an eye on discord throughout the day, this summer.

So this course has changed a little bit over the years that we’ve taught it online. There’s a couple of things that were new last summer that we’re continuing this summer. The big thing is now we’ve added due dates. So there is actually one module due each week, it’s not nearly as self paced as it used to be. But students find that they like having those structures in place instead of allowing themselves to get super far behind in the course, because they’re just simply weren’t deadlines. To go with that we now have a late work penalty. So once a lab is due, it’s 10% off of the total number of points available in that lab per day that it’s late, I think it goes down to a minimum of 60. So anything below 60%, there won’t be a deduction. But to get the higher grades, you have to turn it in on time. The final project does have a small prototype portion to it that we added last semester. And I’m going to continue with that this year. The big thing with the prototype is it doesn’t have to be too big, you don’t actually have to build what you’re proposing in the final project, you just have to build a small prototype so that you’ve played around a little bit with the technology itself. So that it’s not purely in theory, like some of the previous projects were. There have also been some minor changes in each lab, I will warn you make sure that you read the labs very carefully. If you are familiar with this courses content, I change things from time to time, a lot of it is I will be looking out for those changes to be in your labs. Otherwise, I will start to suspect that you maybe got the labs from a previous students. So make sure you read the labs carefully and do what they say in this semester and not what you might have seen in previous semesters, because they are subtly different everywhere. The other thing that we added last summer is we added some interactive discussion times I really enjoyed that. So we’re going to do that again this summer. And I’ll talk a little bit about that here in just a second.

The lab grading in this course is a little bit unique. What you’ll do to get your labs graded is you’ll schedule a time to meet with me virtually using my calendly link, there’s a little 15 minute time slot for grading these cis 527 Labs, you can schedule your grading time before the lab is complete, but the time your scheduling should be after you intend to have your lab complete. So if you know there’s only certain days or times you’re available, you can go ahead and schedule that time ahead of time. The calendly link itself requires four hours notice. So if you try and schedule at eight o’clock in the morning for some time yet that morning, those times won’t be available on calendly. So make sure you think ahead and schedule your times as soon as possible. Each week, you can schedule out ahead of time, if you know you’re going to be done with the lab, when we meet the calendly will actually generate a zoom link for us will meet via zoom will use screen share. And I’ll have you walk through parts of your lab and show me how it’s working. Generally, if the lab is working, it takes about five minutes to grade. If things are not working, it takes a little bit longer, because we’ll look for some partial credit to see where you’re at. But a lot of this course is a completion course it either works or it doesn’t. And you’ll get points if it works. And you get some points, maybe no points if it doesn’t work. So it’s really on you to make sure that your labs are complete and working when you’re ready to have them graded. The other thing I will stay with grading. As soon as you start grading with me, you’re not allowed to make any changes to your labs. Even if halfway through the grading process, you realize you did something wrong. It’s already too late, you started grading. So that’s just to clarify that policy. I have had some students that have asked me if they could change things really quick that they realized were wrong. But it’s like changing the answers on a test after you hand it in to your teacher. So as soon as we start grading, you won’t be able to make any changes to your labs, and you’ll get the score that you’ll get. So keep that in mind and make sure your labs are really ready to go before we start grading them.

So for the discussions, I’ve got them pretty much scheduled. If you look on canvas, you’ll already see the schedule out there. I just need to put names on the times. We’ll have one discussion per week, I actually will schedule it all eight weeks of the semester. The weeks we don’t have a guest speaker we’ll just do those as open office hours. So you can drop in Say hi ask questions, whatever. But for weeks two through six, we will have a guest speaker come in. They’ll talk for about 45 minutes to an hour. This semester. The one thing I do require you to do is submit your questions on canvas beforehand, about two or three days in advance of the session. That way I will have a bank of questions that I And ask the person even if you aren’t able to show up. And then to actually get your points, there are two things you can do. You can either show up in person and ask at least one question, hopefully one of the ones you pre submitted, but if not, if you come up with a question you can ask it, that’s one way you can get those points. If you’re not able to attend in person, you can watch the video afterwards. And I’ll have a little prompt that I want you to respond to based on what you saw in the video. So you’ll watch the video, write your response, and you’ll get your points that way, I really encourage you to attend the live sessions, if at all possible, we’ve got some great speakers coming in. And it’s a great chance for you to interact with some of the people working directly in this field.

So beyond that, this summer, feel free to keep in touch. We have a Discord server for the computer science department that I’m pretty active on so you can always chat with me there. If you’re not on that server, you can go to discord bot.cs ksu.edu. It’ll have you signed in with your case date account and your discord account and it will link them together and invite you to the server. And then when you go back to discord, you should now see the server show up in your list. Email me if that doesn’t work, and I’d be happy to help you with that. We’ll have our zoom discussions once a week on Thursdays. I also host Tea Time office hours on Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. Those are just open drop in office hours we can come chat about anything. The link is always posted on discord when we start so join the discord server or email me if you’d like the tee time link and I’ll send it to you directly. And then of course you can always schedule time to meet with me one on one for Office Hours via calendly is the easiest way to schedule that. And I’m always more than willing to help you out where I can.

Other than that, good luck this semester. Hopefully you enjoy this course. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me anytime and I wish you the best of luck.

June 14, 2021

Resources

• Slides

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.

June 21, 2021

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2021. So we’re on week three, which means that lab do… is lab two is due tonight at 7pm. So make sure you get that submitted, as we’ll talk about in a brief moment, the only things you have to submit on lab two are your two puppet manifest files. That’s all I need. Make sure on your manifest files if you installed any libraries that I need to install to test it, you put a little comment at the top of the file that’s also listed in in the assignment instructions. But a lot of students forget that step. Lab two is due tonight at 7pm. This Wednesday, we have the questions for week three. That should be the week three questions I forgot to change the slide. They’re due at midnight on Wednesday night. And then Thursday at 330. We have our guest speaker it’s Dr. Gary Pratt. I’ll talk about him in just a second. And then next week, you’ll be working on week, lab three, which will be due next Monday at 7pm.

So as I mentioned before, on lab two grading it’s Canvas only you don’t need to schedule a meeting with me. However, if you’d like to talk to me about lab two or have any questions on lab two, you’re welcome to schedule a meeting. But for those of you that have already scheduled a meeting, if you don’t need it for grading, you’re welcome to cancel that meeting or just email me and let me know that you don’t actually need to meet. All you really need to do to get lab to graded is submit your two puppet manifest files on Canvas. And then I will grade them on my VMs here.

So our speaker this week is Dr. Gary Pratt. He is the K-State Chief Information Officer and vice president for information technology. He’s been in that role since 2017. And if I’m remembering correctly, he started in that role about a month or so before the Hale library fire it was very soon after he started that we had the major Hale library fire, which may not seem like it impacts IT until you remember that the vast majority of the IT infrastructure was in the basement of Hale library. And hopefully he can share some information about what it was like dealing with that event and the recovery from that event. So he’s really interesting to talk to he oversees all of K-State IT and the IT infrastructure and organization. Gary Pratt is definitely much more on the big picture side of things doing long range planning and preparation for IT infrastructure changes. He loves to talk to students. He’s a teacher by nature. So I hope you get some really good information out of Dr. Gary Pratt, and I hope you have some really good questions to ask him.

So coming up this week, you’re going to start working on lab three, lab three is getting toward the more difficult parts of this class. It’s not the most difficult lab, but it’s toward the top of the list. In lab three, you’re going to set up and configure some core networking services. So you’ll set static IP addresses on some systems, you’re going to configure remote access using remote desktop and SSH, you’re going to install a DNS and DHCP server and get them configured. You’re also going to play a little bit around with SNMP and Wireshark, and a whole lot of really cool networking tools. This lab especially can be kind of tricky. If you’ve never done any networking before. There are a couple of documents toward the end of the modules in Canvas that are hints and diagrams and some troubleshooting information. So feel free to take a look at that that’s really useful information I’ve written up over the past couple years. And of course, the big thing is if you’re unsure, don’t be afraid to ask questions, you can email me, you can ping me on Discord, you can just ask a question of the class. You can also schedule one on one office hours with me using calendly. So make sure you keep that in mind. There’s lots of ways that you can get help on this lab. In general, I tell students, if you’re working on a problem for more than about an hour, and you haven’t made any progress, that’s a good sign that you need to take a step back and maybe ask for help instead of continuing to beat your head against that problem. So don’t be afraid to ask questions if you get stuck.

Other than that, like I always say keep in touch with me. There’s Discord. There’s zoom discussions on Thursdays after our guest speaker. We host Tea Time office hours, mostly Tuesdays at 330. During the summer, once we get past this teacher training session I’m working with and we’ll pick up again at Fridays as well. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me I’m always available. So hopefully as you work in this lab, you’ll feel like you’re getting some networking figured out. Hopefully, I think this is a really useful lab, especially as you go into any sort of networked environment. It’s one of the more useful labs I’ve heard from students, but it can be tricky. So good luck. Let me know if you have any questions and I will see you next week.

June 28, 2021

Resources

• Slides

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.

July 6, 2021

Resources

• Slides

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

July 12, 2021

Resources

• Slides

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.

July 19, 2021

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week seven announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021. So we’ve only got two weeks left in the class, which means there’s a lot of stuff wrapping up this week. So don’t forget this week today Monday, your lab six is due by 7pm. Tonight, I see that again, most of you have already scheduled grading appointments, which is great. This Wednesday, we’ve got our next last round of discussion responses due and the questions for our last presenter are due on Wednesday. This Thursday, we’re having our speaker Hunter Guthrie, it’s a reschedule from a couple weeks ago, but hopefully he can make it this Thursday. This Friday, your final project proposal is due by 11:59pm. I’ll talk a little bit about that in just a second. And then next week on Monday is lab seven.

So for lab six grading, there’s a lot of stuff we need to see, but it’s pretty simple. First off, you’ll be setting up a Windows File Server. So I just want you to show me that you’ve got the file server set up that you have the Group Policy set up. And hopefully you can show me that your drive maps actually work on your client. Likewise, with Ubuntu will check your file server setup will check your Samba config. And again, hopefully we go to the client and we can see the auto maps of the shared drives there, you’ll create a Windows web application, you’ll install probably blog engine dotnet and set that all up. And so hopefully all we have to do is open up a web browser on your Windows Server and we’ll check to make sure that works. And then in the cloud, you’ll be installing most likely WordPress for the back end and front end, and so on, we’ll just check some of the config files and check that we can pull that up in a web browser. So lab six, again, is not that bad to grade, if everything’s working, if everything is not working, it can take a little bit of time. But hopefully we’ll get through that. In the next week.

Lab seven is the last lab in this class, it’s kind of a catch all for a whole bunch of things. So have you do some backup and restore, we’ll talk about some monitoring. And we will do some DevOps work. So keep an eye on that I’m probably going to quickly post an update to that lab later today. And I’ll send out an email when I get that done. So you’ll have that lab.

Our speaker this week is again, Hunter Guthrie. He’s a system administrator for Evergy, specifically at the Wolf Creek generating station, which is the nuclear power plant that is south of Topeka. He’s another former student of mine. And I’m hoping it will be interesting because he works in a very highly secure and regulated industry working in nuclear power. So he might have some really interesting things to talk about from his perspective, as well.

So coming up, you’ll need to be working on your final project. It’s due at the end of next week, so you’ve only got two weeks left to work on it. The whole idea for the final project is to build something or fix something or change something related to System Administration, you could create a web resource for a new startup, you could look at something that’s already going and how you want to change that you could discuss how you’d set up laptops for school or designing authentication for a company. Discuss stick clients versus thin clients. Anything is really fair, as long as it relates to this class and system administration in some way. If you need some ideas, feel free to chat with me, you can schedule a time catch me on discord, email me, and I’d be happy to share some ideas around. By this Friday, you need to turn in your final project idea, your topic just needs to be short, like a half page or so, describing your topic and where you’re going. So I can see enough that you’re on the right track. I will try and get to those Saturday and grade those really quickly. So you’ll get some quick feedback for me. But that’s really what I’m looking for is to make sure that you’ve got your final project topic in place by the end of this week. And the next week, you’ll be able to work on your final project and get it presented.

To complete your final project, you need to turn in three things. The first thing you’ll turn in is a written report. There’s a template that I give that’s a basic research paper report. I want you to do some research, propose your final project, whatever your proposal is, and do a SWOT a strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats analysis, you can include graphics and data as needed, I don’t have any minimum or maximum length on this, it should be long enough to convince me If I was your CIO, that this is a good idea or a bad idea and that you’ve done enough analysis and research to understand it and make a convincing case. You’ll also do a live presentation roughly 15 to 30 minutes again, convince me that you’ve analyzed it well and that you’ve done your homework. And then finally, as part of your presentation, you will show a small prototype, this should be very easy. Spend no more than a couple hours on it. But for example, if your presentation is about moving into AWS, your prototype might be set up a server on AWS. If you’re talking about authentication systems, you might download and install a different authentication system. That’s really all I’m looking for in this final project.

The presentation itself you can do live with me via zoom or you can prerecord a video and send that to me, you need to present or send me the video on or before next Friday. One thing I do recommend is that you schedule now my times do get full filled up pretty good Quickly, I might have other things show up on my calendar. So if you want that 430 slot on Friday, schedule it now so that you’ve got it. Also, if you work during the day or you have some conflicts, you can email me for alternative arrangements. I have a couple of time slots after five o’clock on Friday. I can also do after five o’clock on Thursday. So let me know if you’re interested in those times if you got some conflicts. And again, the sooner the better. So you can lock in the time that works for you, so you can get that done.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. I have the slide every week. I’m on Discord. We have zoom discussions. We’ll start doing tea time on both tuesday and friday again, so make sure you keep that in mind. And I also have one on one office hours you can schedule with me anytime on calendly.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week. Hopefully it’ll be working on your final projects, getting your labs wrapped up, you’ll make some PowerPoint slides or something. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know otherwise Good luck this week and I hope to see you again soon.

July 26, 2021

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week eight announcements video for cis 527 in summer 2021, here we are, it’s the last week of the class. This week, you should be working on lab seven, which is due tonight, it’s due by 11:59pm. And I’ll explain that in just a sec. We also have the week seven discussion response that’s due on Wednesday. So make sure you get that in. I’ll get the video posted later today. For Friday, your final projects to do by 1159 at night, and we’ll talk a little bit about that. And then we’ll also talk about TEVALS.

So first off, for lab seven grading, you really don’t need to meet with me via zoom to do lab seven grading. As long as everything’s working, you should be able to submit stuff via Canvas, and I’ll be able to grade it from there. However, if you’re having trouble or something isn’t quite working, it’s probably best to schedule a time for grading. So we can poke around and at least get you partial credit. So specifically on lab seven, for task one, the windows AD backup, I just need screenshots. For task two, the MySQL backup, you’ll send a zip file with your backup and a readme document describing how to restore it. For three, you’re going to install Munin or Ganglia. And so you’ll just send me the URL that those are working on. And I should be able to see those there. For task four the DevOps, you should be able to add me to your Git lab on the CS Git lab server, and then send me the URL of the website that it points to. And so I’ll make a post basically on Git lab. And I will check your server to make sure that the URL updates to see the new content. And then finally, for extra credit, if you do the extra credit, there’s just some screenshots to show me that you got the dashboards working. So all of that can be submitted on canvas. And so you can work until midnight tonight to get that submitted. And I will try and get that graded early this week once I get them submitted.

So again, for your final project, you’ve got a written report that you’re working on. There’s a template that I give that talks about all the different sections you might have in your report. Basically, your report is talking about what your presentation is: going through your proposal talking about your analysis and giving me a conclusion. So you can include graphics and data, there’s really no minimum or maximum size, what I generally tell people is make it long enough so that I understand what you’re talking about, and short enough that I don’t get bored reading it. Your presentation, you need to schedule at least 15 minutes, I recommend scheduling a 30 minute time slot for it. And basically, you’re going to present your material and convince me that you’ve analyzed it well. And that it either is a good idea based on your analysis, or it isn’t a good idea based on your analysis. So if you haven’t scheduled that, please make sure you get your presentation time scheduled soon. So you get the time slot you want. I’m mostly free Thursday and Friday. So you should be able to find a time that works, I hope. And we’ll talk about scheduling in just a second. And then also don’t forget, you should have a small prototype as part of your project, it should be pretty easy spend a couple hours on it. So if you need any ideas for ways that you can include a prototype in your project, feel free to contact me and let me know.

So like I said the presentation it can be given either live or you can pre record a video. You should present on or before Friday and specifically on or before Friday at 5pm. Unless you email me and make alternate arrangements. I don’t intend on watching any presentations at 11 o’clock on Friday night. But I can do a few shortly after five, especially for people that work eight to five, I can work around that schedule. So please make sure you either schedule your presentation ASAP, or email me to make alternative arrangements so that we can make sure that your presentation gets done on time.

Also, this week, you should be getting a TEVAL from the K-State TEVAL System. Please take some time to respond to that. That’s the only real way that I get feedback from you about what to do and what to change about this class. It’s totally anonymous, I can’t see any of your feedback until final grades are submitted in this semester. Actually, I don’t think I can see these till like the end of August. So all your comments and feedback are well welcome both positive and negative. I really do appreciate all your feedback. And if you talk to anybody that’s taken this class previously, they will tell you that it has changed a lot specifically based on their TEVAL feedback. So it’s really helpful for me if you take some time to respond honestly and thoughtfully to that feedback, and I really appreciate it. Also once we get all the grades done, Final Grades should be posted on I believe Monday or Tuesday next week. At once I get done with grading I will email the class and let you know that the grades you see in Canvas is the grade that you will get in KSIS. Once that email goes out if you notice any problems on your grades either now or when that email comes out. Email me ASAP if you have any concerns. One of the things I will be doing soon is going through and making sure all the late penalties are properly assessed in the gradebook. So your grades may fluctuate a little bit as I get all of that cleaned up in the gradebook. But I will probably send an email Monday next week letting you know that grades are final and you’ll be able to take a look and make sure everything looks the way you expect. I don’t think there shouldn’t be any surprises in this course at this point.

Other than that, please make sure you keep on keep in touch with me. You’re welcome to chat with me on discord anytime. We also continue to have our tea time office hours Tuesdays at 330 And Fridays at 1030 and will continue that through the rest of the summer I believe so please make sure you’re more than welcome to join there. And then of course, you can always schedule time with me on calendly to meet with me via one on one office hours. I’m always happy to do that. Even if you just want to chat about life or the universe or anything else that’s going on, feel free to connect with me anytime you want. So other than that, that’s getting toward the end of this class. This is probably the last announcements video you’ll see for me. It’s been a pleasure having you all in my class this semester, and I look forward to seeing your final projects and I wish you the best of luck.