Summer '22 Week 1

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• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week one Announcements video for system administration during summer 2022. My name is Russell Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this course, my contact information is shown here. You can also find it on the syllabus and on the homepage on K-State canvas, it’s by far the best way to get a hold of me is to just email me. But as I discussed in the intro video, and as I’ll discuss here, for anything related to the course, please use discord, it’s a great place for us to chat and you should get some very quick responses from you there. So a little bit about the structure in the course.

This course uses gated Modules in Canvas, there is about one module due per week. So if you look at the Modules tab, you can already see the first few modules published there. Please make sure you check the due dates on all of the assignments in the modules. The due dates are kind of spread out throughout the week sometimes. So make sure that you’re aware of the due dates that are upcoming, especially for the lab assignments. For these lab assignments, we’re going to do live grading, which means that you need to schedule a time to meet with me via zoom, and then I’ll be able to watch your screen using screen share. Have you walked through the lab live with me watching. And that’s how we’ll do the grading, you need to not only schedule your grading time, but actually have the grading time before the due date. So if a lab is due Friday at five, you need to schedule and meet with me before Friday at five to get full credit on that lab.

There’s also some discussions those are separated out in their own module, the discussions have their own due dates that are a little bit different than the rest of the weeks. So make sure you check those out. Because we have a small enrollment this semester, I didn’t go to the effort of actually bringing in new discussion speakers. So we’re going to watch the videos from last summer that I still feel are very relevant. And you’ll have a chance to respond to those and ask some more questions that I will then pass on to those speakers and see if I can get some answers. Also, this course has a final project, the final project module is upfront, so you can check it out right away. Be thinking about your final project. As you work through these first few labs, you don’t actually have to have a full proposal for your final project until toward the end of class. But the sooner you can come up with an idea and start thinking about it, the easier it will be to do down the road.

So as I said, for course communication, I prefer to use discord for any course questions or discussions. So if you have a question on a lab, if you’re not sure how to do something, if you want to chat about anything, Discord would probably be your best place to start. I’ll be there all of the other students will be there, it’s a great place to get questions answered, you might actually get answers from folks that are outside of this class if they pop in and help out a little bit with that. So Discord is definitely your first place to go. Email is the official form of communication here. Mainly it’s for personal issues, grading questions to dues. But if you ask a question on Discord, and you don’t get an answer, feel free to email it to me. And I will guarantee that you’ll get a response from me within one business day. So like I said, email is official. But Discord is a bit more flexible for communications. That’s why I’m pointing most things to discord. But email is still there for official.

So to be successful in this course, first and foremost, you need to come into this course with a growth mindset, you can learn how to do this, it is going to be difficult, and especially some of these labs are meant to be a little bit of a struggle. If you haven’t done some of these things before, it’s going to feel kind of frustrating to do it the first time, part of the point is working through that frustration and learning how to get past it because the second time you do it, it will be much easier. Another big thing I really encourage you to do, as you’re working through the content in this course, don’t just mindlessly watch or read the content, but actually try and engage with the content. A lot of the content that you’re going to see in the lab, in the lab textbooks in the videos that I do in all of the activities that you see, really is helping you work toward the lab. So if you’ve gone through that content, and really engaged in it and tried to learn it, the labs should be much, much easier. For the labs themselves, I really encourage you to try and work iteratively, pick one task in the lab and try and get that working as best you can before you move on to the next task. It makes it much easier to make sure that you’ve got things working in debug problems before you move on. Another big thing to really keep in mind is to save your work early and save it often VMware the virtualization tool that we’re going to use support snapshots, you definitely have to create a snapshot before the end of lab one. And most students learned the hard way that it’s much, much easier to take a snapshot before you try and install it, configure something and then roll back to that snapshot. If you screw it up versus trying to uninstall and undo all the configuration you’ve done snapshots work really great and VMware, please take advantage of that. And then finally, don’t be afraid to ask for help. You know, like I said, part of this class is exploring on your own and reading documentation. But if you get stuck and you’re not making progress for about a half hour or so, that’s a good sign that you need to take a step back and come and ask for help. I really hate to see students spinning their wheels on something in this class and then later on finding out that it wasn’t something they could have solved anyway. So if you get stuck, try and get past it if you can, but if not, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

So I talked about this a little bit earlier. But for the lab grading each lab, you’re going to schedule a time with me via Calendly for grading. The two exceptions are lab two, you don’t have to do live grading. And I believe right now lab seven is set up that way, but I’m changing some parts of lab seven. So that may change toward the end of the semester, you can schedule your time for grading before the lab is complete, as long as the time that we will meet is after the lab is complete. So feel free to go in on Monday and schedule a time for Friday afternoon, if you are sure that you’re going to have the lab done by Friday afternoon, totally fine. Calendly does require you to give me four hours notice. So if you try and go online and Friday at two and try and schedule a time for Friday at four, it’s not going to be available. So you need to make sure you get your lab schedules taken care of ahead of time, you can even go ahead and just ask me for a weekly timeslot. And I’m happy to set that up for you. When we do the lab grading, we’ll connect via zoom will use screen sharing so I can see what you’re seeing and have you walked me through different things on your virtual machines. And then the other big thing about lab grading is once we start grading, you cannot go through and change things. So if we’re halfway through grading, and you realize you did something wrong, it’s already too late. Because we started the grading process, it’s already been submitted as it were. And so bear in mind that once you start the grading process, you can’t change anything, even if you notice that it’s wrong.

So I also touched on this a little bit earlier, I’m normally in this class, I try and bring in guest speakers for discussions. However, we’ve got a very small group this semester. And because I had some really good discussions last summer, I think I’m just going to reuse those videos from last summer. So for the discussions, this time, you’ll get a chance to watch the video and write a reaction to the video. And then you’re also going to come up with a few questions for that speaker. And once I get all those submissions, I will actually send those on to that speaker and see if I can get a written response back that I can share with the class. So even though you may not get to interact directly with these speakers, they’re more than willing to chat with you offline via email. So I’m happy to pass questions around based on those discussions. So that’s really everything you need to know to get started in this class.

Like I said, please feel free to keep in touch. The first module has you do a quick introduction on Discord. So make sure you get that done soon. You can join us on Discord for chatting anytime I will be there I’ll probably be posting news and articles throughout the summer just to keep the engagement up. Another thing you can do to keep in touch is several of the computer science faculty host what we call t time office hours. Those are Tuesdays at 3:30 and Fridays at 10:30. Throughout the summer. Tea Time is meant to be an open office hours time where you can come in and chat about anything except classwork that you’re working on. So life university if you need advice, if you just need to hang out with people, a lot of times it’s just me and the faculty hanging out and having a lot of fun while we work on other things. So feel free to join us for tea time. I think it’s a really great opportunity to be able to get to know some folks in industry and some faculty. Sometimes we have alumni folks dropped by. So check out tee time. And then of course, if you need any help, you can always schedule one on one office hours through Calendly. It’s the same link that you use for grading. So feel free to grab a time if you need some one on one help from me as well.

So that’s all I’ve got for this week’s announcements. You’re welcome to get started on the class. I wish you the best of luck throughout the semester. I’ll try and post a weekly announcements video usually sometime on Monday. That gives you some updates on the next week’s work. And so keep an eye out for that. You’ll also see me post things on Discord every once in a while but best of luck to you this summer and I look forward to working with you throughout the semester. Good luck

Summer '22 Week 2

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Video Script

Hello and welcome to the week two announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week you should be finishing up lab one. Lab one grading is due tonight by 7pm. So if you haven’t scheduled a time to meet with me for grading, make sure you do that ASAP. I do have trainings on Monday afternoons from about one to three, I usually get done with those a little earlier. But it’s worth noting that at least half of my afternoon is taken up by another meeting. So make sure you schedule your schedule your grading times in advance so that you can get those in whenever they work for you. And of course, if you work from eight to five, let me know and I’ll make some time available in my calendar probably after 5pm. So around six or seven to get you taken care of coming up this week, you’ve got lab two quizzes, which are due on Friday. And then next week, you’ll be turning in lab two and the first discussion which is the week two discussion.

So the discussion for this week is Seth Galitzer. In years past, if you watch the first video, we used to bring in live speakers for this class. Unfortunately, this summer because of low enrollment, and I don’t have a ton of time, I’m reusing the videos from a previous semester. So our first video speaker is Seth Galitzer. He’s our computer science system administrator. He has been in that role since 2006. He originally has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from K State. And he basically is the person that manages all the Computer Science Systems and labs that we work with all of our research computing. For us as faculty, he helps us purchase and configure our own computer equipment. So Seth has a world of research in system administration and always loves to share his knowledge. So take a look at the video we recorded last year, answer the prompts about it and then come up with a couple of questions you’d like me to pass on to Seth. And then I will take care of passing those on, it might take a little bit for me to get back from him since he’s a little bit busy in the summer. But I will try and get some answers to those questions for you as soon as I can.

So this coming week, you’ll be working on lab two, the basic idea of lab two is to redo everything that you did in lab one using the Puppet automation tool to actually make it automated using code instead of doing it by hand. So to get started with lab two, you’re going to reinstall your operating system and a virtual machine install Puppet run all the updates on the operating system. And then very importantly, you need to make a snapshot of your operating system before you start working in Puppet. That way as you write your Puppet manifest file and test you can roll back to that snapshot before you did any Puppet work and use that for testing. Every semester I have one student forget that step where they forget to make a snapshot and then they have to reinstall the operating system and try again, because there is no way to rollback a Puppet manifest once you’ve applied it, you need to rollback the snapshot in the virtual machine. The other big hint I can tell you is try and keep it simple. This is not meant to be a very complex lab, most solutions are around 200 lines of code. And for a lot of this, you can simply configure it manually, then use puppet resource to query the system figure out what that looks like. And then the output of puppet resource is very similar to what you’ll put in your puppet manifest file. Don’t just copy paste the whole thing but put just the parts that are important into your manifest file. And it should work just fine.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord that you’re welcome to chat with me anytime. I’m available for tea time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. If you want to come out and talk about just about anything in the world, or just hanging out with people while you continue to work on homework. And then of course you can always use my Calendly link to schedule a one on one office hours with me if you have any questions or concerns about the class. So I know that you might be thinking with lab one, you have to do it again in lab two, but it’s really worth it to see the difference between manually doing all this configuration work and then automating that using a tool like puppet. I hope you really start to see the value of automation and System Administration. That’s one of the big things we push for. As always, if you have any questions, let me know otherwise, good luck, and I will see you next week.

Summer '22 Week 3

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Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week you should be wrapping up lab two, which is due tonight at 7pm. I’ll talk about that briefly in just a second. You also should be working on the week two discussion questions and responses which are due tonight at 11:59pm. So make sure you leave enough time to watch that video, write your responses and respond to the question prompts there as well. This Friday, you’ll have the week three quizzes that are due and then next Monday, you’ll be turning in lab three, and also doing the week three discussion.

So for lab two grading, you should be working on that today, all you have to do is submit your puppet manifest files to Canvas. So you should have a windows.pp and the linux.pp. Sometimes people have built them as single files, that’s fine. If there’s any libraries or modules I need to install in puppet to make your files work, just put those in the comments at the top of your file. But really, all you should have to do is submit your to manifest files for lab two. And then what I will do for grading is I will download them, I will run them on my system, I will reboot my system, I will run them again, just like I discussed in the lab. That way you don’t have to worry if some of your group memberships don’t take the first time I run it, I reboot it, I run it again. And then I’ll go through and check to see if your file did all of the configuration that it’s supposed to do. Hopefully it does. If you have any questions or concerns on lab two, I’m available, you do not need to schedule a meeting with me to discuss lab two. I’ll just create it on canvas. But if you have any questions or want to discuss lab two, I’m totally open for meetings today. Just let me know.

So your speaker for this week is Dr. Gary Pratt. He was the K-State CIO and has been in that role since 2017. Probably his biggest claim to fame at K-State among other things is he was hired about a month before the Hale Library fire that took down all of our systems. For those of you that are unaware, in 2017. In about May, we had a fire in Hale Library that didn’t do a ton of damage to the library itself. But as part of putting out the fire, there was a lot of water in smoke damage. And the water actually filtered down into the data center that is in the basement of Hale Library where a significant amount of K-State’ss IT systems were kept. And so that created a lot of issues where many central IT systems down were down for several weeks, I think cases was brought back online the day before enrollment was supposed to start in June. So it was a really big deal. He talks a little bit about that in his video as well. But the bigger picture as a CIO, he oversees all of K-State’s IT and he’s really in charge of the big picture and long range planning that goes on at K State. He does have an education background. So he loves teaching. He loves talking to students. Just like Seth last week, Dr. Pratt is also more than willing to answer questions from this class. So if you submit any questions as part of your responses, I will collect those and for those on the Dr. Pratt and hopefully get a response from him sometime later this summer.

So this week, you should be working on lab three, lab three is where we’re going to pivot and start working on a lot of networking. So we’ll study core network services, we’ll talk about setting IP addresses in our systems, we’re going to install a DNS and a DHCP server in Linux, we’ll also install an SNMP, server in Linux. And we’ll do some playing around with Wireshark to capture some network packets and see what that looks like. lab three becomes much more complex than lab two, depending on your background and networking. I understand for many of you, this might be the first time you’ve worked with a lot of these technologies. And so it can be very complicated. You’ll be reading a lot of documentation and trying to figure out how those things work. Just like with lab two, my best advice is to make snapshots often whenever you get something to work. And if something does not work like you expect it, feel free to roll back to that snapshot and try again, specifically SNMP, I do have some notes in there, the DigitalOcean documentation works up to a certain point, but it does not give the correct instructions for how to set a password for a new user account. So there’s a second set of instructions that you want to follow for that particular step of setting up SNMP. It does totally work. But you may have to play around a little bit to see which process actually works for you. Thankfully, at the end of lab three, there are some hints and network diagrams that you can look at. There’s a great video on how to debug a DNS server using dig so you can check that out. So make sure you watch all of the content at the end of lab three before you ask questions. It really will help you understand what we’re trying to do and how to debug it. But if you get stuck, don’t be afraid to ask questions. I’m more than happy to help with this.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord. If you have any questions, you can join us for tea time office hours on Tuesdays at 330 and Fridays at 1030. If you want to chat about anything going on, I also have one on one office hours available via the Calendly link that you use for scheduling grading. So feel free to use that. And you can always send me an email and I’ll be happy to answer your questions there. So other than that, that’s where we’re going this week you’re going to start working with networking. It’s a big step in towards system administration. Next week after this we’re going to be working on LDAP and active directory so you’ll have a our core authentication services setup and then week five we pivot over into the cloud but this is the week that start setting up the real system administration part where we get networking working as always if you have any questions let me know otherwise good luck this week and I will talk to you next week

Summer '22 Week 4

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Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week for announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. This week, you should be working on lab three, which is due today by 7pm. So make sure you getting that wrapped up and also that you have a time scheduled with me to get your grading done. I’ll talk about that in just a minute. You’re also should be working on the week three discussion, which is due tonight by 11:59pm. So make sure you watch the video, write some responses and also provide some new questions for our guests. This week, you’re working on week four. So we four quizzes are due Friday. And then the next lab which is lab four is due next Tuesday. We’re postponing it today to to the holiday on Monday, the July 4. So there is a lab that’s due next Tuesday, you’ll need to schedule a time with me to get that graded. But there is no discussion this week, we’re pushing off the discussion until week five. So you don’t have to worry about a discussion this week, just focusing on lab four.

So for lab three grading, you should have done a lot of different things revolving around core networking in this lab. So the things I’m going to be looking for in a grade is the remote connections. So making sure you can use remote desktop into your Windows system and using SSH into your Linux system. You should also have set a static IP on your Ubuntu Server VM. And then on that server, we’re going to check your DNS settings your DNS lookups, we’re going to check DHCP. And I’m also going to look at SNMP and Wireshark. Hopefully, you can do the live demo of SNMP. But a lot of times, it doesn’t always work the way you want it to. So I’m hoping that you follow the labs and took screenshots so that I can look through everything. Same thing with Wireshark, you should have screenshots for a bunch of things in Wireshark, to show that you’re able to find those individual packets and find the data that we’re looking for. As always, if you have any questions about this, let me know you can talk to me and ask questions before grading starts. But as soon as we start grading, you can’t change anything. So if you realize you missed something or something is incorrect. Once we start grading, it’s too late, I have to take it as it’s submitted. So if you have any questions on lab three, please let me know.

Some tips for success on lab three, this is one of the first more difficult labs in this class. So I really encourage you have to take some time, read the lab very carefully and make sure that you understand what it is asking you to do. This lab in the next lab I give quite a lot of information on so it should be pretty easy to implement it as it’s written. But you do have to read carefully and make sure you understand what I’m asking for. You may also have to spend some time reading various bits of documentation to understand how to do what I’m asking you to do. But thankfully for a lot of this, I’ve provided some tutorials that you can pretty much walk through and adapt a little bit to your environment to make sure it works. Make sure you check out the posted hints, especially at the end of lab three, there are a couple of extra pages on how to do debugging with DNS, what your network diagram should look like things like that. Make sure you use the resources linked in this lab, especially in the lab itself. There’s a lot of resources that are what I use when I have to do these things. So make sure you take advantage of those. Like I said, don’t be afraid to ask me questions. And finally, the big thing with this lab is don’t spin your wheels. If you feel like you’re getting stuck, if it’s taking you a long time to solve something. Take a minute slow down, ask me questions. Generally, if you’ve spent more than about an hour trying to solve something, getting it to work, and it doesn’t seem to work, that’s a good chance to take a step back and ask for help. It is entirely possible for you to run into issues that you cannot solve in this lab. Sometimes students will bring to me issues that I cannot solve. And so if I can’t fix it, it’s not worth spending any of your time trying to fix it as well. So don’t spend your wheels ask for help if you get stuck.

So our speaker coming up is Kyle Hutson, this is actually the week five speaker that you’ll be looking at, but I’m going to briefly talk about him now. Kyle Hutson is one of the Beocat admins at K-State and manages K-State’s supercomputer. If you’ve been an engineering building, you’ve probably seen it right outside the computer science classrooms. He has a lot of experience working on powerful hardware and large multi cluster systems. He does a lot of talking about working in the cloud versus working on premises. So he brings a really unique look at how we do this. He also does a lot with scientific computing. And so scientific computing is a different realm to work in than most industrial computing setups because you really want to maximize your CPU capabilities there. So Kyle is going to talk all about Beocat, you’ll get to watch that. And that is due in week five.

So coming up after this week, the next lab is lab four, where you’re going to be working on Active Directory and LDAP. Basically doing authentication against the server. So you’ll set up a Windows Server VM, you’ll configure it for Active Directory, you’ll add your Windows client so that so it uses the Active Directory to log in. You’ll also add one of your Ubuntu clients to that so that logs into Active Directory. And then likewise on your Ubuntu server, you’ll set up an open LDAP server and configure your one of your Ubuntu clients to log in via open LDAP. So it’s kind of complex, but it sets some of the groundwork for a lot of other things that you can do in system administration. It really mimics what we actually have set up in the computer science department where we have an Active Directory server that everything logs in against. Biggest hints for lab four - take the time and make snapshots, especially, I encourage you to make a snapshot of your Windows Server VM before you try and install Active Directory. The Active Directory install process is notorious for failing every once in a while. And so if you can roll back to that snapshot and try it again, it will make your life a lot easier. So take snapshots anytime you get something working, or before you start something so that you can roll back. The same goes for open LDAP. When you configure TLS, for open LDAP, it is a very fraught process, it even takes me a couple of tries to get it right. So make snapshots with open LDAP before you start trying to do the TLS process. So you can roll back to that snapshot if it doesn’t work.

So after lab four, we have lab five, lab five has a lot of new content in it this year. So we’ll have to see how it goes. In lab five, we’re going to configure a couple of cloud resources, we’ll set up SSH, configs, and firewalls. And then the two big new things this year is we’re going to add Docker to our cloud resources. And we’re going to set up some Docker containers and a Docker reverse proxy. So those are some new things we’re going to look at this year. I’m open to feedback. So if you have any questions or concerns about the new content around Docker, please let me know so we can improve that and make that better for the future.

Other than that, don’t be afraid to keep in touch. We’ve got discussion times on Discord. We’ve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. You’re always welcome to join and hang out anytime that we’re on Tea Time. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me, you can shoot me an email if you have questions. There’s lots of ways that you can get help. So don’t be afraid to take advantage of that. Other than that, hopefully this week and next week are not too frustrating, but I will be open with you. lab three and lab four are probably the most difficult and frustrating labs in this class. Especially if you’ve never worked with this technology before. It really can be painful to get it working the first time so don’t let it get to you take some time. Take some breaks, ask questions if you get stuck. And as always, I wish you the best of luck and happy Fourth of July and I will talk to you next Tuesday.

Summer '22 Week 5

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Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week five Announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week, you should be wrapping up lab four, which is notoriously the hardest lab in this class, it is due today by 7pm. So make sure you get that done and schedule a grading time with me later today. So we can get that looked at. And then next week, you’re going to be shifting over to lab five, where we’re going to pivot from virtual machines on our system to actually working in the cloud. So Friday of the week, five quizzes are due and the next Monday, you’ll be turning in lab five, as well as the week five discussion.

So for lab four grading, it’s actually pretty simple. There’s not a whole lot that I need to see. But there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes that need to work correctly. In order for this to work. Basically in lab for grading, I’m going to check your Windows Server, make sure it’s up and running, going to check your Windows Active Directory User and Group to see that you’re actually able to create your user. And then I want to see you actually log into the active directory using Windows. Likewise on Ubuntu, I want to see your open LDAP server working and actually see a user and group in PHP LDAP admin. And then I want to see your Ubuntu be able to log into LDAP. And then either that same VM on a different snapshot or a different VM log into Active Directory either way. So really, it takes only about five minutes to grade this if all your VMs are up and running. But it is a lot of complexity behind the scenes to get all that to work.

So again, just like last week to be successful, make sure you read things carefully. Make sure you look at the posted diagrams and the exercises, use the resources you have available to you I try and link some really good guidance for how to do this. But the big thing is, don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you’re spinning your wheels. If you get stuck and you’re not making progress for about an hour, feel free to ask questions. I’m available on Discord, you can email me you can join us for office hours, anytime that you want. Just let me know how I can help.

So this week’s Speaker I mentioned him last week is Kyle Hutson, one of the Beocat admins and K-State, he helps manage key state supercomputer that you probably seen in the engineering building right next to the computer science classrooms. He has a lot of experience working with very powerful hardware with very large on premises setups. And he talks a little bit about the difference between K-State hosting its own supercomputer versus using resources in the cloud, such as AWS, and why we would do something like that. And he also talks a little bit about scientific computing and how it differs from the general computing that you might work with at an industry itself.

So this week, you’re going to be working in lab five, where we’re going to move everything to the cloud. So the big thing with lab five is you’re going to create two droplets on Digital Ocean, which are two virtual servers that work up in the cloud, you’re going to set up SSH and a firewall on those so that you can connect to them remotely, you’re going to set up simple Apache sites on each one with a virtual hosts so that you can access websites on each one, you’ll also need to set up a DNS domain name and actually point those DNS names at those servers so that you can access them directly there. And you’ll also set up a Docker reverse proxy following the instructions in some of the new Docker videos this year. So lab five is kind of introducing all the cloud concepts. And then lab six and seven, we iterate on that a little bit more.

So a couple of things that you want to check out are the GitHub education pack, which is education github.com, it looks like this got cut off. But you can find DigitalOcean credits by going to try to digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer that will give you up to $100, credit and DigitalOcean. If you have a new account, if you go to nc.me, you can get a free .me domain for one year using your .edu email address when you sign up. If you have trouble getting access to either of those, please feel free to ask me, I’ve got referral credits, I can send you the free trial links, there’s lots of codes that you can use. So ideally, you shouldn’t have to pay anything for this, if you’ve never set up accounts on these services before. If you have set up accounts on these services at most, you may have to pay about 11 dollars to do this. So let me know, if you have any trouble getting this to work, I’m happy to share some referral credits or help you out in any way possible. But those are the two things you’ll need to sign up for in order to start working in the cloud.

So that’s all I got this week. As always, we have good discussions on this court. So you can always join me there, you can join me for tea time office hours, Tuesdays at 330. And Fridays at 1030. We’re always online in zoom for about an hour, you can schedule a one on one office hour with me using my Calendly link, you can always send me an email as well, I’m always happy to help. And remember the big thing in this class is anytime you get stuck, or you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, that’s a good time to take a step back and ask for help. Instead of trying to power forward, there are certain situations you can get into in this class where it’s very hard to make a forward progress. And so don’t be afraid to ask me questions. And I can help you either reset or restart or adjust things so that you can get it to work. So that’s what we’ve got going on. I really like this XKCD comic here where it talks about the cloud. I in my lecture, I talked a little bit about the cloud that it’s really just from a point of view, it’s really somebody else’s computer. And so you or I might think of as cloud is actually somebody else’s computer. So it’s really important to think about the cloud that way it’s kind of a good framing Advice to use for the cloud and so I’d like to end on this XKCD comic for the slideshow so as always if you have any questions let me know otherwise Best of luck working on lab five this week and I will see you next week

Summer '22 Week 6

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week six Announcements video for CIS 527 in summer 2022. So this week, you should be wrapping up lab five, which is due today at 7pm. So make sure you get that done. Most of lab grading is really simple. And we’ll talk about that in just a minute. You should also be wrapping up the week five discussion, which is also due tonight by midnight, so make sure you get that done. This week, you’ll be working on Week Six content. So the week six quizzes are due Friday. And then lab six and the week six discussions are due next Monday.

So for lab five grading today, the biggest thing I’m going to check is that you can SSH from your system to the front end. And that I can also use the grating SSH key to get into your front end. And then that we can SSH from your front end to your back end. We’ll also do things like checking the firewall, the date and time configuration, we’re going to check Apache DNS and make sure that HTTPS is working. So Apache is running on your back end. And then on your front end, you should have Docker with Docker reverse proxy setup. And so we should have three different websites we can access one on the back end using Apache and then two on the front end in Docker using some sort of reverse proxy, they should all be set up so that we can access them. So hopefully you’ve got all that working for lab five. If you’re having trouble, feel free to schedule a time with me, and I’d be happy to meet with you and get that checked out.

So the speaker that you’re going to look at this week is Sarah Allen. Sarah Allen is a system administrator from McCown-Gordon and a former CIS 527 student who’s now working in industry in System Administration. Her background is mainly in Help Desk and Frontline support for a large construction company. And so because of that, she deals with some unique challenges that a lot of other companies may not face. And her expertise is really interesting in that particular area of the field. So look forward to checking that video out of Sarah. And then of course, she’ll respond to a few prompts and ask a few questions of Sarah, at the end of that.

So this coming week, you’re going to work on lab six, I don’t have that posted right now. But I should have that posted by the end of today. Um, lab six is mainly focused on doing things around file servers, and drive mappings on Windows and Linux, we’re also going to look a little bit at application servers and web servers. And by the end of lab six, you’ll have a couple of working web apps. The plan is for lab six, you’ll do the windows stuff in your VMs. And you’ll also do the file server stuff and your VMs for Linux. And then in the cloud, you’re going to actually deploy some sort of a web app to Docker, I believe we’re going to do WordPress, but I need to look into that a little bit to make sure that that works the way I want it to before I actually post that lab.

Also, we’re getting toward the end of the semester. So now’s the time to start thinking of your final project. The goal for the final project is to build something new or fix something related to system administration. So you can think about systems you interact with on a daily basis that you’d like to change or something that you think you might want to build that has a system and registration component to it. Some things you could think of would be setting up a web resource for new startups. So how would you deploy their website? How would you host that? How would you maintain that? Automatically setting up a bunch of new laptops for school, designing some sort of central authentication and networking system for accompany discussing the differences between using thin clients and thick clients in a computer slab? The choice of antivirus clients the choice of using Chromebooks for web development. There’s lots of things that you can look at related to system administration. If you’re not sure you can chat with me for ideas. The biggest thing for this final project is to come up with something, propose it and then do a SWOT analysis of your proposal. And so I’m really curious about the SWOT analysis more than anything, where you look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. I will admit, in years past, most students have spent a lot of time on the design of the final projects, and then not a lot of time on the SWOT analysis. But the SWOT analysis is really more of the points of your final project. So make sure you leave plenty of time to do a deep analysis on it. And really try and present to me the pros and cons and show that you’ve thought through this very quickly.

Don’t forget, if you need it, you can get the GitHub education pack, you can go to try digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer or go to nc.me to get access to DigitalOcean Name Cheap for super cheap, if not free. I also have some credits and both of those so if you need any help getting any of the resources for this class, just let me know.

Otherwise, feel free to keep in touch. I still have discussions on Discord I host tea time every Tuesday at 330 and Friday 1030 It’s a great time to just hang out and chat while you work on stuff. You can also schedule a one on one office hours with me using my Calendly link that’s in my email signature in the syllabus. I’m always available, so don’t be afraid to ask me questions. Other than that we’re getting near the end. We’re on Week Six of eight. So just two more weeks to go. Make sure you keep up on the labs make sure you start thinking about your final project. If you have any questions, let me know otherwise. I look forward to seeing you again next week.

Summer '22 Week 7

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week seven announcements video for CIS 527 In summer 2022. So we’re getting toward the end of the semester. So this week, don’t forget you got lab six due tonight by 7pm. So make sure you get that submitted, I’ve got most grading times available for students. But if you need more help or needed writing time, just let me know. It’s also available on Calendly. Like always, there’s a week six discussion that’s due tonight by 1159. So make sure you watch the video, respond to it and post some questions for our guest speaker. This week on Friday, you’ve got the week, seven quizzes that are due. And you also have your final project proposal that’s due, we’ll talk a little bit about the final project and the second. And then next Monday, lab seven, the last seven, the last lab in this class is due. And there’s also one more discussion that is due next Monday as well. I will be posting lab seven, hopefully later today. So you can get started on that.

So for lab six grading, we’re really looking at four things, you should have a Windows File Server setup with the Group Policy, so that automatically mounts those network drives via Active Directory, you should have an Ubuntu file server setup with some work in fs tab and some other files to actually get the files to mount correctly, you should have a Windows web application running in IIS on your Windows Server. And then you should have a cloud web application running either directly on your back end and front end droplets or running it through Docker. Those are the things we’re going to be looking for. For lab six. The nice thing is if it works, it takes all of five minutes to grade it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try and dig into it a little bit and figure out exactly what’s going on. So that hopefully we can get it fixed. So lab seven is kind of a grab bag of all these other topics that I really want to cover in this class, but they don’t fit nicely into a single lab. So we’ll spend some time talking about backups and restore. And we’ll have you do a practice Backup and Restore on an Active Directory server will talk a bit about monitoring and give you a chance to set up some monitoring systems on your droplets on the web. We’ll also talk a bit about DevOps and we’ll play around with web hooks and a few things like that. So that’s really what we’re doing in lab seven.

The speaker for this week is Hunter Guthrie. Hunter Guthrie is a plant system administrator for Evergy, specifically at the Wolf Creek generating plant. He’s a former student of mine in this class. And he’s really unique because he works in a very highly secure industry working at a nuclear power plants. So you know, Sarah had her own concerns and things working in a construction industry where it’s much more about usability and working out in the field. Hunter is kind of the other side of that where he works in a very highly secure industry. So everything has to be very carefully vetted and protected. And so he works on kind of an entirely different setup than what Sarah has. And it’s really interesting to see those two different sides of the IT coin.

So you should be starting to think about your final project. The proposal is due this Friday. The goal of the final project is to demonstrate what you’ve learned in this class by proposing to either build something or fix something or change something related to it and System Administration. Some ideas that you can think of would be designing a web resource for new startups. So how would you host their website? How would you ensure high availability? How would you deal with high traffic loads? Looking at things like scalability and the design of that system? You can think about setting up laptops for a school if a school gets a donation of 50 laptops or 100 laptops? How could you use tools like puppet or chef or Ansible to set up and manage those laptops, you could think about central authentication. If you’ve got a small company that’s growing, how could you help them build out a central authentication system using a Windows Server and Active Directory and getting all the clients connected, maybe looking at things like VPNs, so that you can have multiple offices connected together on the same network or, you know, today thinking about work from home and how people can securely access work resources from home. You can also discuss things like thin clients versus thick clients, specifically in a lab setting. So you know, here in K-State, we have a couple of computer labs that have thin clients that just remote desktop into a server. We also have some labs with thick clients or traditional desktops. And so there’s pros and cons on that, and that’d be really good. The bottom line was this final project, hopefully, you’ve got an idea in mind. If not, feel free to chat with me, I’m happy to kind of dig into things you’re interested in and try and pitch you an idea of something that I think would be a really useful final project.

So the final project itself, it really has a few different deliverables. The first big thing is you’ll need to have a written report, I highly recommend using the template that I pointed out in the final project. Be aware of the template each paragraph is listed as bullet points. Your report should not be bullet points. The bullet points are simply saying what sorts of paragraphs what sorts of ideas you should address in those sections. So do not submit a report full of bullet points. It should be a written report with paragraphs. In the written report, you’re going to spend some time researching, proposing and doing a SWOT analysis of your project. You can include graphics and data, anything that’s needed to help me understand your proposal and your SWOT analysis. The big thing to focus on is the SWOT analysis. You need to do enough work on your proposal so that it’s understandable that you’ve proposed it We understand the parameters that you’re using. But you really should focus a bit on the SWOT analysis. A lot of students usually tend to make the SWOT analysis at the last minute. And because of that, they really haven’t taken enough time to analyze specifically the weaknesses and the threats related to their project, I really don’t want to see a SWOT analysis that says that any proposal has no weaknesses or no threats, that’s simply not the case, you just have to think a little bit bigger, be a little bit more malicious towards your project so that you can come up with those weaknesses and threats. Once you’ve got all that done, you’re going to schedule a live presentation where you will present your written report to me, in usually the presentation is about 15 to 30 minutes, a lot of times it covers about the same structure and content is the written report. The goal of this live presentation is to convince me that you have analyzed your proposal Well, a good way to think of this is I am your CIO, you are working for me, and you’re proposing this as a new technology project press to undertake. So you should convince me as your CIO, that this is a good idea that you’ve done your analysis that you’ve done your research, and that we can proceed with this. So your presentation is about 15 to 30 minutes, you can present any style you want. If you want to use PowerPoint, if you just want to scroll through your report, if you want to do something different, that is fine. The last part of your final project is a small prototype, I want you to take one small part of what you’re proposing and build a small prototype of it. The prototype should be a minor portion of this, maybe spend about two to four hours on it. But things like if you’re doing the laptop setup for a school, maybe play around with Ansible and compare it to puppet a little bit. If you’re doing a single sign on for a company look at maybe building another Active Directory server and connecting up some different clients in different ways. If you’re building a website for high availability, maybe spin up a couple more droplets on DigitalOcean and play around with things like their load balancers or their automatic scalability. Again, the prototype should be a small part of your project, maybe spend no more than two or four hours on the prototype. But it really wants you to build at least a small portion of what you’re proposing. So that I can see that you’ve done some research and gotten hands on with something that you’re actually playing around with.

So the presentation itself, you have two options, you can either give it live to me via zoom, or you can pre record a video. Even if you pre record the video, we still need to have a scheduled time on Zoom. So I can do some q&a. So make sure you leave time in the schedule for that. It should be presented on or before the Friday of finals week. So that is a week from this Friday, July 29. You can go ahead and schedule your time right now. So if you know that there’s a time that works for you, get it on my schedule. If you work during the days, and you want to schedule something after 5pm, email me so that I can get you on the schedule, my schedule does tend to fill up pretty quickly that week. So don’t be afraid to do that. But like I said, you can either present it live via zoom, and we’ll do q&a Right after or you can pre record a video. And then I will watch the video and we will schedule a zoom time where I can do q&a with you after that. So submitting a video that was recorded Friday night that doesn’t cover the q&a, you’re going to lose points for that. So make sure that you get that in early enough so that we can schedule some q&a time as well.

That’s really all I’ve got this week. Hopefully that helps you understand the final project and what’s coming up. As always, you can keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord, I’ve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. I do one on one office hours via Calendly you can get in touch with me a lot of different ways. But hopefully you’re getting toward the end of the semester and I’m sure that I will see a few PowerPoints in this class. So make sure you’d be thinking about your final projects and how you want to present it and make it dynamic. As always if you have any questions, let me know and I will see you once again next week.

Summer '22 Week 8

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the weekend Announcements video for CIS 527 In summer 2022. This week we should be wrapping everything up in the class. So you’ve got week seven discussion, which is due today by 1159. And then lab seven and the final project are due on Friday both by 1159. As well, you also should be receiving an email inviting you to complete a TEVAL for this course later today. So make sure you take care of your TEVALs. That information is really really helpful to me as I continue to improve and work on this course.

So for lab seven grading, you don’t need to schedule a meeting with me for lab seven, I’ve reconfigured the lab so that you can do it completely online. For task one, you’ll submit a set of screenshots showing me that you were able to successfully backup and restore a Windows Active Directory. For task two, you’re going to submit a zip file and a readme that shows your backup process. For task three, I just need the URL where I can find your installation of Munin or Ganglia so I can check to see that that’s working. And then for a task four, you’ll send me the GitLab that you’ve created, you’ll add add me to it as a collaborator. And then you’ll send me the URL where I can actually find that GitLab on your server so that I can check and see as I make changes, do they get deployed to the server properly using a web hook. And then if you do do the extra credit, you’ll send me some screenshots as well.

So for your final project, we talked a little bit about this last week. But the big things I need from your final project is a written report, I highly recommend that you use the template that I provide, just to get the headings on it. Remember, the template uses bullets, but your project should not use bullets, it should use paragraphs in that template. So make sure you write that in a professional format. You’re going to spend your time researching, proposing and doing SWOT analysis, I really want you to focus on the SWOT analysis, and especially on the opportunities and threats and weaknesses. Those tend to be the ones that students really struggle with, they do a pretty good job getting the strengths figured out. But sometimes the weaknesses and the threats really need some work. You can include graphics, data, charts, whatever as needed to make your points, then you’re going to do a live presentation from 15 to 30 minutes long. You can either do that live to me via zoom, or you can record it and we’ll talk about that in just a second. Basically, pretend I’m your CIO, and you’re trying to convince me that you’ve analyzed your proposal well, and that it supports your conclusion. Don’t forget to include a conclusion at the end that either shows that you should go forward with this project or your SWOT analysis might show that you should not go forward with this project, make sure you make clear in your conclusion which one you’re doing and how you’re supporting that. And then finally, you should have a small prototype that you’ll demo, it should be pretty easy to do spend maybe two or four hours on the prototype, not a whole lot of time.

So the presentation you can do live or pre recorded. If you want to do it live schedule a time to present with me, I recommend scheduling that for at least a half hour, probably a full hour to give enough time for q&a and setup. If you want to do a recorded presentation, you’ll record the presentation and send it to me ahead of time. And then you’ll need to schedule a time to do q&a After I’ve watched your video. So I’ll watch your video first. And then I will do q&a. If you don’t schedule a time for q&a After the recorded video, I will take some points off. So to account for that I really do want to have some time to do interaction and questions and answers, even if you record the video. So schedule those now if you need to. You can also email me for any alternate arrangements if you’re not able to present during the day. So just let me know.

So for this week, I’m going to be sending out TEVALs so make sure that you respond to those quickly. And honestly, all of your comments and feedback are welcome. It really really helps me as I continue to improve this course. So any feedback you have for good or for bad is really, really helpful to me. So please take some time to fill out your TEVALs. For Final Grades, check your grade in Canvas, I will send out an email when everybody’s grades are finalized, you can email me if you have any concerns, please let me know if there’s anything missing or incorrect ASAP. So I can go through and get that corrected. It’s much easier to do that now than it is next Monday when I’ve got grades due immediately.

Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got discussions on Discord. I’ve got Tea Time office hours, Tuesdays at 330 Fridays at 1030. You can join me there. I’ve also got one on one office hours. So lots of different ways you can get in touch and get some help on finishing your final project. But hopefully you get to the point where you’ve solved it, you’ve cracked the code, everything is working. And hopefully at that point, you continue to have purpose in your life. Hopefully you’ve got other things you want to continue working on outside of this course. But as always, if you have any questions, let me know and I will talk to you later this week.