Fall '26 Week 3
Resources
Video Script
00:00 Hello and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So this week, Lab 1 is due tomorrow night. I set the due date at 7pm just because I’ve got a few people that need to meet with me after 5 because of their work schedule. But make sure that you get Lab 1 graded by tomorrow evening. Remember, for grading on this lab, you need to schedule a time with either me or Sicheng get lab one graded by tomorrow evening. Remember for grading on this lab, you need to schedule a time with either me or Sicheng to get it graded. And then please remember to check Sicheng’s calendar first and schedule with him first and then schedule with me. If he’s not available during times that you’re available, that’s because I’m paying for Sicheng’s time and I want to make sure we use his time wisely. And so I’d prefer if you schedule with him first before you schedule with me just to share the load a little bit. And because I’ve got other things going on, but my schedule is also open as well. More today than tomorrow. Most of my slots tomorrow are already filled up. But if you haven’t scheduled yet, please make sure you do that ASAP on either Sicheng’s calendar or my calendar. Then coming up next week, we’re going to have our first discussion session, and we’ll talk about that here in just a second. And then you’ll start working on Module 2 and Lab 2.
01:08 So like I said, for this class, we’re going to have some discussion sessions. These are chances where I get to bring in folks from the industry to talk to you about their careers working in IT and related fields. Generally, these are going to be Wednesdays from 2.30 to 3.30. And so I kind of use these as some office hours times. I have sent speaker invites. I have filled out the schedule. So if you look on the Canvas homepage, you’ll find the dates of all of the speakers and who they are. I’m working on getting bios and LinkedIn links for everybody. And our first speaker is coming up on Wednesday, September the 16th. And that will be Seth Galitzer. Seth Galitzer is an engineering IT manager. He was formerly the computer science system administrator for almost two decades, I believe. He’s a K-State CS grad from a little bit before my time even. Seth has been around forever. He’s one of the best IT people I know. He’s very knowledgeable, and he is somebody that you’ve probably heard from or interacted with in your career as well. He’s going to come speak to our class about his career as a IT manager on campus. This will be on Wednesday, the 16th at 2.30 PM. Remember for the speaker sessions, there are two things you need to do to get credit.
02:11 The first thing you need to do is before we meet with the speaker, you need to ask at least a couple of questions on Canvas. I think it’s like two or three questions that you want to ask the speaker. So read their bio, read their LinkedIn, come up with some questions that you think would be interesting to have that speaker answer. Try and customize them to the speaker. That’s really helpful. And then you can either attend the session live on Zoom and hear from Seth and ask him a question. And if you ask him any question, you’ll be able to get full credit for attendance. Or if you’re not able to attend or if you attend to it, you’re not able to ask a question. Then you can watch the video afterward and write a short little write-up that shows that you watched the video and paid attention to it. And I’ll ask some prompts there. But by far, the easiest thing to do is to come to the session, sit there, join us in the audience, give Seth somebody to talk to, and then join the discussion afterward. That’s a really great thing to do. So we’re moving on to Lab 2. Lab 2, the point is to redo Lab 1 using Puppet. So what we’re going to do is do everything she did manually in Lab 1. We’re going to redo that using a Puppet script. So for Lab 2, you can delete your previous virtual machines. You’re going to make two new virtual machines.
03:16 You’re going to reinstall the operating system. You’re going to install Puppet. We’re actually using an open source version of Puppet that has a different name that I talked about in the assignment. So make sure to check that out. And then you’re going to make a snapshot of your operating system once you get Puppet installed. Then the process is work on writing your Puppet manifest file, test it in your VM, and then roll back and try it again. One thing I will remind you, if you make any edits in your VM, when you roll back to before you made that edit, all those edits go away. So make sure you keep a copy of your manifest file outside of your VM so that you don’t lose your work. Every semester somebody makes this mistake and I’m trying to warn you right now, remember that any edits you make in the VM will be lost when you roll back. Just remember that. The other big thing on these manifests is keep it simple. If you use the puppet resource command to query your system, only grab the things that you know you need to set. You don’t need the full resource output, just the important things. And so the solutions for this can be less than 200 lines of code. I think my solution is under 100 lines of code, actually. So they don’t need to be very complex. They just need to be very detailed and very correct, but they don’t need to be very long.
04:23 So you can work on that. Other big thing to keep in mind in this class is a growth mindset. The labs in this class are challenging. They’re meant to be challenging, especially in this class. As we go on, I will give less and less detail in the assignment descriptions itself, and I will write the assignments more and more as a outcome that you should reach, not a process to get there. It’s up to you to figure out the process. So I really to you to figure out the process. So I really want you to make sure you’re taking the time to read the linked documentation, doing some searching on your own, asking me for clarification if anything doesn’t make sense. And then of course, remember, I’m giving you two weeks to work on these labs for a reason. So make sure you start early on them, work methodically, make snapshots, and ask questions if you get stuck. So other than that, hopefully things are going well. If you have any questions, there’ll be a mega thread on ed discussion that you can always participate in. I also have one-on-one office hours. You can schedule with me using Calendly. There’s lots of ways you can get in touch and stay involved in this class. So feel free to reach out anytime. Otherwise, hopefully you’re not too disappointed that you have to basically do Lab 1 again, but I think it’s a really nice comparison to do Lab 1 manually and then have lab to write a puppet script to do it automatically, which is something that you do in a larger industrial setting. So that’s really what we’re going for here. As always, if you have any questions, let me know.
05:35 Otherwise, best of luck and I will see you again next week.