Summer '22 Week 2

Resources

• Slides

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.