Fall '25 Week 1
Resources
Video Script
Hello, and welcome to the week one announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2025. My name is Russell Feldhausen. I’ll be your instructor for this semester. My contact information is here on the screen. You can also find it on the Canvas homepage, on the syllabus, just about anywhere you look with this class. You can find my contact info. My email is here. My website is here. You can also find me on Teams and Discord as at russfeld. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of. One thing to be aware of, I do work remotely. I live in Kansas City, and so I’m working remotely Tuesdays through Fridays. I am on campus on Mondays. So if you want to see me in person, you can meet with me on Mondays. Usually Monday mornings is when I’m going to be available. And there is a way to schedule that that I’ll talk about here in just a minute. But just be aware of that. The rest of the week, I work remotely, which does mean I’m pretty easy to get a hold of on Teams or Discord or Ed Discussion anytime you have a question.
For the semester, I do have one graduate teaching assistant, Josh Barron. Josh worked with me last year on this class. So this is his second year working on this class. So he’s going to be a really good resource for you as well. So definitely get to know Josh. His Calendly link is also on the homepage and on the syllabus. So if you need to schedule a time to work with Josh, please do so. For this course, I encourage you to schedule with Josh first if he is available, mainly because I am paying him. And so we want to make sure we make good use of his time and make sure that he is very valued in this course. If you can’t get a hold of Josh or you need extra help and Josh is not available, please feel free to schedule with me. But definitely we want to make sure we make use of Josh’s time primarily if we can to make sure that we get our best value with Josh and that he gets lots of experience working with you. So that would be great.
So in this course, this course uses gated modules on Canvas. There’s one module due every other week. So make sure you check the due dates on Canvas. I will start publishing the modules probably. But by the time you see this video, the first couple modules will be published. I’m actually recording this video on Wednesday of the week before class, a little bit behind the scenes there. I still haven’t finished the first couple of assignments. I need to do them again to make sure that they actually work. But by the time you see this video, they will be published. So check the due dates on Canvas. For each lab assignment, for a lot of them, we’re going to do live grading. And I talk about that a little bit later. So just be aware. So, and then we’ll have some discussions. Throughout the semester, I try and bring in three to five guest speakers that work in industry, that work in IT. And so I bring them in, give them a chance to tell you about their job, what they do, and then you get to ask some questions of them. And then at the end of the semester, we’ll do a final project.
So communication in this course is pretty simple. There’s an Ed discussion board that is linked on the left side of Canvas. That is the place to go for questions for this course, discussions. Every lab assignment is going to have a mega thread there. That’s where I’m going to post my tips and tricks and ideas and anything that come up during the assignments. So please, please, please keep an eye on Ed Discussion. That is going to be the place to find the cool information. If you have a personal issue, a grading question, a to-do item for me, etc., email the help email address, which is cis527-help at ksu emailprod.onmicrosoft.com. If you’re using webmail, just type in cis527-help and it will auto-fill that for you. That is a great place. It goes to both me and Josh, and so either of us can respond to that pretty quickly. So what I tell students is email is the official communication, but ed discussion is much more flexible. And so we’ll use that for a lot of the stuff in this course.
So to be successful in this course, this course is fun because this course represents a lot of what it’s like to be an actual system administrator. However, that does mean that it can be very frustrating at times, or it can feel like I’m not giving you all of the answers, or things are a little harder than they should be. That’s kind of the way it is. I hate to say it. That is what being a sysadmin is like, and you’re going to experience that a little bit in this class. So I encourage you to come into this class with a growth mindset. You can do it. Anybody in this class can do everything I’m asking you to do. You just have to be willing to accept the fact that you have to learn a little bit and it’s going to take some struggle and that’s okay. Second big thing, do not just read or watch the content, but engage with the content. I’m going to, throughout my videos and throughout the assignments, I’m going to show you certain things. I really encourage you to engage with that. Follow along. Do it yourself. Try and do something a little bit different and see what happens. If you just skim through the videos and then jump right into the assignment, you’re going to feel like you don’t know what’s going on because you really didn’t engage with the content. So really take some time, engage with the content. Click the links that I have. Almost every page has a set of links at the top of it. They’re the links that I read when I was putting this page together. Click those links. Those are going to be so important for you. A lot of times those are the real documentation that you need to read in order to get the assignments to work.
Another big thing in these assignments is work iteratively, pick out a small goal, get that goal working, and then move on to something else. I see a lot of students that they’ll take an assignment that has seven bullet points and they’ll try and work on all seven bullet points at the same time. And that’s just nearly impossible to do. Pick one thing, get it working. Pick another thing, get it working. There’s a reason that I have the assignments broken out into several bullet points. And typically they’re in the order that I encourage you to work on them on. I don’t usually switch those up too often. So work on that. As always, save early, save often, make backups of your files. I guarantee at least once the semester, somebody in this course will make a change to a file in their virtual machine. They will roll back their virtual machine to a previous snapshot, and then they will realize that their file was not present in that snapshot and they lost all of their work. It happens every semester. I know it will happen. Hopefully it doesn’t happen to you. So save early, save often, back your stuff up. Be careful. Every sysenman learns this the hard way. I can share with you some great stories online of like there was a developer that worked for, I want to say it was GitHub or no, it was GitLab and accidentally deleted the production database because he forgot what terminal he was working in and just did the delete database command, thought he was working in the dev machine, ran that in prod, dropped all their data, lost a whole bunch of stuff. So be careful.
Last big thing, if you get stuck, ask for help. I do not expect anybody in this course to pass this course without asking me for help at least once, unless you have already been a sysadmin in your life. And even then, it might be really tricky. So I really encourage you to ask me for help. Ask Josh for help. We are here to help you out. We have some hints already ready to give you, but you have to ask. So don’t be afraid to ask for help if you get stuck.
So let’s talk about lab grading. Lab grading, the way we do most of the labs is we grade them interactively. What that means is when you’re done with your lab, you’re going to schedule a time to meet with either Josh or I using our scheduling link. Josh currently uses Calendly. I use the Office 365 booking tool. They’re basically the same thing. You’ll schedule a time with us via Calendly. You can schedule that time before your lab is done. So if you know you’re going to have your lab done on Friday, you can go ahead and schedule a time for Friday, even on Tuesday, but you have to get graded after your lab is done, obviously. So you can schedule at any time. Check Josh’s schedule first. If he’s not available, then schedule with me. But again, I want to prioritize scheduling with Josh so that we’re using up his time wisely. It does require up to four hours notice on both his calendar and my calendarly. So if you get done Friday at 3, you are SOL because you can’t schedule for Friday at 4.30. Also, probably it’s already been scheduled. So just be aware of that.
What you’ll do is you will have your lab open on your computer. This allows you to work on your desktop at home, whatever machine you’re running your virtual machines on. You’re going to load up your virtual machines. Please have them running when you join the Zoom. You’re going to join the Zoom. You’re going to share your screen with your virtual machines. And Josh and I are going to talk you through what we want to see. We expect you to be prepared to do the things we ask you to do. You should know how to do them. For example, in the first lab, we’re going to ask you, show us the file permissions for this folder that you created. I give you the command in the lab. You should be prepared to run that command and know what it does. That’s one big thing is make sure that you are prepared to demonstrate what you have done in this lab. You may want to practice a little bit to make sure you’ve got it. And then, of course, the other big thing is you cannot change once you’ve started. Once we have started grading, you run a command, you’re like, oh, crap, that doesn’t look right. It’s too late. You already turned it in. We saw it. That’s what it is. We are a little lenient about that, but generally you can’t make a change once you’ve started grading. So just be aware of that.
So there are some discussions that we’re going to have. Like I talked about, I’m going to bring in some guest speakers. So I’m going to send out a survey here pretty quick to try and figure out what day and time works best for everybody. And we’re going to set that as kind of an office hours time for this course. So please respond to that survey when you see that come out probably sometime this first week of class. We’ll schedule a time online via Zoom. What you’ll do is about a week before our discussion session, I will announce who the speaker is. I’ll give you a little bit of their background, their bio. And then what I ask you to do is submit questions for that person on Canvas before the presentation session. So one to three questions you want to ask that person. And then during the discussion, you can either join the live session and participate by asking one of your questions. Or if you’re not able to attend live in person or you don’t get your question asked during the in-person session, you can write a short little response that shows that you are there or watch the video afterwards. It’s pretty easy to do, but it gives you a chance to see and hear from some people working in industry. I definitely know one of the ones I’m going to get this semester is Seth Gallitzer, who was formerly the CSS admin. He’s now overseeing a lot of the engineering support staff. And so I really would love to hear from him and the change in his job responsibilities as he has migrated to a new job over the last year. So be aware that that’s coming.
All right. I think that’s all you need to know for this first week. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to keep in touch. Ed Discussion is the primary place to do that for this course. However, I’m available on Discord and Teams, so you can reach out to me either of those places. I usually can respond pretty quickly to those. I hold tea time office hours, usually on Monday mornings. Tea time is a good time to come in and chat with me and hang out and talk about anything outside of class. So life, the universe, and everything. And then, of course, you can always schedule one-on-one office hours with me using my schedule link that’s going to be on the syllabus on the homepage. And at the bottom of every email you’ve ever seen from me, it’s going to have the link right there to schedule office hours with me. So best of luck this semester. I really enjoy working with this class. I was a sysadmin for several years. This is my fun class to teach that I really enjoy working with you. So best of luck this semester. I hope things go well. And most likely you’ll hear from me about every other week in this class. I’ll try and post an announcements video as we go through the classes. We have each new assignment up there. So just be aware of that. You’ll be able to see these in the announcements on Canvas. Like I said, best of luck this semester, and I will see you again in a week or two.