Summer '22 Week 7
Resources
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.