Summer '22 Week 1
Resources
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