Summer '22 Week 3
Resources
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