Summer '22 Week 4
Resources
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.