Fall '24 Week 1

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello everyone and welcome to the week one announcements video for CIS 527 and CC fall 10 in fall 2024. So as you probably saw in the introduction video my name is Russ Feldhausen my contact information is here you can find it on Canvas you can find it on the syllabus. I’m really excited to be teaching this class I think this is my eighth time teaching the system administration class. It’s a really fun class it’s one of the most valuable classes that I get to teach at K -State and I’m really excited to be working through it with you. Every week I’m going to do an announcements video maybe every week maybe every other week it’s generally unscripted it’s me talking through everything that’s in my head so you’re gonna see a much different version of me in these announcements videos versus what you see in the videos for the class.

So for this semester I have one teaching assistant Josh Barron. Josh Barron is a GTA that’s working with me he is new to this class but he’s really excited to be catching up and learning with all of you all. He’ll be handling a lot of the questions and grading in this class and then I’ll also be available to answer questions help with grading whatever we can do. We have a pretty big class this semester I think I have 32 enrolled right now which is the largest version of this class I’ve had in several years so it will take a little bit of getting used to as we get used to the scale and taking care of all the grading so just bear with us as we get started on that.

So like I talked about in the introduction with this course there are seven modules in the course plus the final project it’s a 16 week semester so you’re going to do one module every other week. I generally recommend that you start on the modules as soon as they’re available because really some of these lab assignments may take you a couple weeks to get done. The one thing that I have seen students do in this class that causes them to fail is wait to start the lab assignment until the weekend before it’s due and then they get stuck and then it takes them time to get help and sometimes it takes multiple times to get help and then they’re two or three days late and they sacrifice 30 or 40 percent of their grade on the lab because they started two days before it was due. So I encourage you to start your labs early and check the due dates and put them on your calendar. In most chapters I have the lab assignment right up front so you can start working on the lab as you go through the of the content. You don’t have to read and watch everything before you can start on the lab. I do recommend reading the entire lab assignment before you start on it, but generally you can get started as soon as you get to a new module.

For the lab assignments, what we’re going to do is live grading. It’s the best way I’ve come up with to grade this course. So generally what happens is you’ll schedule a time on Calendly with either Josh is preferred, if his calendars fold and you’ll schedule on my calendar. I do that to protect my time, but also because I’m paying for 20 hours of Josh’s time and I want to make sure we use up Josh’s time more effectively than using up my time because I’m actually bouncing between about four different classes this semester. So you schedule a time to grade, you’ll get a Zoom link in that scheduled calendar invite. And so you’ll join the Zoom, you’ll share your screen, and then either Josh or I will talk you through some things that we want you to demonstrate. In general, you should be prepared to demonstrate everything that you did on the lab. So if we ask you, show us where the users are, you should know where to go and show us what users you set up. If we ask you to confirm that your DNS server works by querying these few things, you should know how to query your DNS server. We shouldn’t have to tell you the commands to do that. We’ll prepare to do that if we have to, but really it’s a demonstration of your ability and understanding of the system. So not only do you have to set it up and have it working, but we expect you to know how to use it so that when we ask you to demonstrate things during the lab, you should be able to go, oh yeah, I know how to do that and get it figured out. So be prepared for that.

We’re also gonna have some live discussions throughout the semester. The plan for the live discussions is to bring in a industry person or some sort of other person and have them talk about their experiences with system administration. I can tell you the first one is most likely going to be Seth Galitzer, our computer science system administration here, system administrator for computer science. I’m probably gonna try and get somebody from Bayocat. I’ll probably try and get Kyle Hudson, who used to be a Bayocat, and then was a Canran, and now he’s moved on to some high -performance computing stuff in industry, which is really cool. And then generally I try and get somebody from larger industry and I try and get somebody from more administration side of things like CIO, CEO type roles. So I’m working on scheduling those and we’ll get those figured out soon. So just keep your eyes open for that.

So for communication in this course, like I talked about, the best thing to do is to post in the Ed discussion board. Ed discussion allows you to post questions. In general, I recommend posting the questions openly and publicly so that everybody can see them and answer them. I know that that’s asking a lot, especially because you may not want to ask that question publicly due to imposter syndrome, but it’s okay. If you have that question, probably everybody else in the class does too. But if you’re concerned about that, you can post a question anonymously so that other students won’t be able to see who you are. Full disclosure, Josh and I will know who you are. but it won’t be public to anybody else. Or you can post a question privately just to Josh and myself and we’ll answer it there. But we do reserve the right to copy paste your question and anonymize it and post it publicly if we think other people should see it. So just be aware of that. Outside of that, you can email us, if you have any personal issues, grading issues, to -dos, things like that. The help email address, CIS527 -help. If you type it in in web mail, it should auto complete. But if not, you need to use the full email address here on the slide. That goes to just Josh and myself. It’s a great way for us to keep track of stuff. Please email that help email address instead of emailing us individually. That way if one of us is not available, the other one might be able to respond very quickly. So I tell people email is official and discussion is much more flexible and that’s why we like to use it in this course.

So how do you succeed in the system administration course? This course is notoriously difficult. I’m not gonna lie. System administration requires a growth mindset. I’m going to give you a lot of lab assignments. that are purposefully vague. It’s not meant to be vague, but it’s meant to represent what you’re going to get in industry. Thankfully, I give you pretty direct ideas of where I want you to go, but some of the lab assignments might say things like, set up an Active Directory, it needs to have this Active Directory domain and these users. What I don’t tell you is these steps to actually do that. However, you’re going to have a lot of videos where I’m going to walk through some of those steps, and there are tons and tons of links to documentation and discussions for how to do this. And so the real key to success in this class is having a growth mindset and understanding that I’m giving you the framework to work within, but you may have to do some of your own reading and your own research outside of my textbook to really figure things out. And so that’s why I tell people, don’t just read the content or watch the videos, but try and engage with it. Try and follow along as best you can. And especially on the lab assignments and on a lot of my pages, click the links. For example, on like lab assignment three, I tell you set up a DNS server, and then right below that are three or four links to the documentation that I read when I set up a DNS server. And so I’m really trying to point you at these other resources to show how people are going to do this in industry and what kind of resources are available. So please, please click the links that are available. In this class, there are something like 300 links to other content. It’s a pain in the butt every semester to go through and review those because the links constantly get changed but I do the best I can to keep them up to date. If you find a broken link, let me know. You can get some bug bounty points for that.

Other big thing I tell you in this class is to work iteratively and save early and often. Try and do a little bit of a lab at a time. Don’t try and do like all five things at once. Try and pick one task and get it mostly working before we move on to the next one. And take advantage of the fact that the virtual machine software we’re using, VMware allows you to make snapshots. For any of you that play video games, it’s like a quick save. Anytime you think you’re going to do something that might break, you might wanna make a snapshot. before you do that. Especially when you get to some of the later labs, every semester it happens at least once. I have somebody that sets up a computer and then either sets up an LDAP server or an Active Directory server and the setup fails. Sometimes it fails through no fault of your own, it just happens. And then they ask me how to fix it. And I tell them, unless you have a snapshot, the only way to fix it is to wipe your machine, reinstall the operating system and try again. And usually they only do that once and then they remember to make a snapshot. But I’m warning you now, that happens every semester. So make snapshots early, make snapshots often and especially make snapshots when I tell you to in the labs.

And then the other big thing to be successful in this class is to ask for help. This class is not designed for anybody to be able to breeze right through it without asking for help. That’s totally an intent of this course. Is I… I definitely know that almost everybody’s gonna get stuck. Something’s gonna be vague. You’re gonna misinterpret something, something won’t work right, whatever. It’s really, really easy to run into problems like that. And I see students all the time that spend six or seven hours trying to solve a problem that turns out that they don’t have the capability to solve or it may not even be solvable. And so I really hate seeing students do that and then they get discouraged and frustrated with the course. I don’t want that. And so instead what I tell you to do is if you’ve been stuck on a problem or you’re not making any forward progress for about a half hour on whatever task you’re working on, that’s a great time to stop and ask for help. You should be able to constantly make forward progress. You may take a few steps back at times, but if you’re stuck debugging a problem and you haven’t figured it out for a half hour or so, take a step away, ask for help, get on our office hours list, post an ed discussion, whatever, and just kind of step away and let it sit for a while. Sometimes you’ll figure it out on your own. Sometimes we’ll figure it out when we get to you. But the worst thing you can do is sit there and be frustrated and trying to just continually spin your wheels and solve a problem. That doesn’t really work in this class. So don’t be afraid to ask for help. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Josh is here. Anybody that’s ever taken this course will tell you that the best thing you can do is take a break and ask for help. I’m usually very willing to sit down and help and solve problems, answer questions, anything that you need to be successful.

So I talked a lot about the lab grading already, but just as a quick reminder, schedule on Calendly. Check Josh’s schedule first. I want you to schedule with him if at all possible. I’m kind of the backup person to schedule grading. And then we’ll set up a Zoom. The other big thing to remember is generally our Calendly calendars require you to schedule four hours in advance. So don’t look at my calendar at three o ‘clock on a Friday expecting to find that four o ‘clock slot open because it does not allow you to schedule times within four hours. Also, the four o ‘clock slot on Friday is almost always taken early in the week because somebody got there on Monday to schedule that time on Friday. So. The other big thing to be clear about lab grading, you need to not only schedule your grading time, but your grading time needs to happen before the due date. In years past, I’ve had people schedule a time on Friday for some time next Tuesday and think that that’s allowed. But no, the grading meeting, the appointment has to happen before the due date. So you really have to think ahead on this. The last thing on the lab grading is once you have started the grading process, and generally Josh and I will both ask you to confirm, are you ready to start? Do you have any questions before we begin? As soon as you start the lab grading process, you cannot make any changes to your lab. If we see something is wrong, even if you immediately notice that it’s wrong and try and fix it, it will be counted wrong. We have to kind of freeze your lab where it is when you start the grading process. So just be aware of that.

I also talked about the discussions a little bit. I’m gonna be sending out a survey here in the next few days that we’ll try and figure out what time of the week works best for everybody. Once I get at least a plurality of times that are available. We’ll schedule it online via Zoom. I’ll start getting people on the schedule itself. For the discussions, the way this works is you’re going to submit some questions before the discussion starts. And then during the discussion, you can either participate in the discussion by asking some of your questions or you can write a response afterwards. There is a little module in Canvas that explains all this, but it’s pretty easy to do.

So that’s really all I’ve got this week. This is probably gonna be the longest announcement video that you’re gonna get throughout the semester. I’ll try and do these, like I said, about every week, every other week or so, just to let you know what’s on my mind or if there’s anything going on. As of right now, modules one through four are posted and tested. The other big thing with the modules in this class is I have a couple of disclaimers in there. The version of this class you’re going through was originally written for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20. Obviously those are old at this point. And so I’m redoing everything for Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24, all of the labs have been tested with those versions of software. Not all of the videos are going to get recorded this time. And so a lot of the older videos are perfectly applicable. It all works or it’s very similar in the current systems. But if you see a video that looks like completely out of whack and wrong, let me know, I’ll put it in as a bug bounty. I may rerecord some quick videos if I need to go through and fix anything. But just be aware that a lot of the documentation and a lot of the textbook is gonna refer to Ubuntu 20 and Windows 10, it may even refer to Ubuntu 18 in a few places. We’re gonna be using the latest and greatest in Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24. So just be aware of that.

So throughout the semester, if you wanna keep in touch, we’ve got a discussion that’s a great place to chat with me there. I’m also on the Discord server and on Microsoft Teams and I will chat with you there as well. Email is always available, the CIS 527 help address is there. The other things you can do every Mondays, I host Tea Time Office Hours with David and Virgo in the computer science department. It’s available via Zoom, it’s also available in person. I believe we’re gonna be in one of the classrooms this year. I think we’re in 11, 17, but I’m not sure. Those are Monday afternoons at one o ‘clock so you can come join us there and hang out. Or you can schedule one or more office hours either with myself or with Josh anytime you need help in this class. So feel free to keep in touch. Other than that, good luck this semester. I hope everything goes well and I look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks on the next announcements video. Good luck.