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Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week three announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So this week lab one is due tomorrow on Wednesday by 7 p .m. so make sure you’re working on getting that completed and don’t forget to schedule a grading time either with myself or with Josh to get that graded. I know my calendar is pretty limited today and tomorrow because of a lot of meetings and I’m on campus tomorrow due to the Labor Day holiday so if you have trouble finding a grading time let us know and we’ll work with you on that. Generally for the first lab I’m pretty lenient on late penalties as long as you get a grading time scheduled before it’s due and if we have trouble with that let us know. I’m also working with Josh that we may adjust the day of the week that labs are due just to better fit our schedule. It seems like a lot of my meetings tend to have been on the first part of the week so we may move the due dates a little bit just to make more room for that. So make sure you’re getting lab one done. The quizzes for module two are due next week so make sure you’re getting those started and our first discussion prompt is actually on next week on Wednesday September 11th. We’ll talk about that in just a second and then September the 18th is when lab two is due.
So the discussion sessions I sent out a quick announcement those are going to be Wednesdays from 2 .30 to 3 .30 not this week starting next week on September 11th because of this week I’m on campus on Wednesday. Normally we’ll just do office hours during those but three to five times throughout the semester I’m going to bring in a guest speaker to talk with us. Our first speaker is on September 11th and I’ll be posting information about that guest speaker and it’ll give you a chance to actually write some questions to ask our guest speaker. I’ll probably announce his name in next week’s video but it’s going to be Kyle Hutson so I’m going to get some information from Kyle and I will post that out in an announcement so you can write some questions for Kyle and have those submitted before our discussion session.
So after this week you’re going to start working on lab two. Lab two is basically a redo of lab one but this time instead of manually installing everything and setting it up you’re going to script it using a scripting tool called puppet. Puppet along with Ansible and Chef and SaltStack and some of these other tools are really great for defining a configuration in code and then applying it to an operating system. So what you’ll do for Lab2 is you’ll create two brand new VMs. You’re not going to reuse your VMs from Lab1. You’ll reinstall the operating system, you’ll install Puppet and Updates, and then as soon as you get Puppet installed, you’ll make a snapshot. And then what you’ll do is you’ll write a Puppet manifest file, you’ll test it on your VM, and then you’ll roll back to that snapshot and try it again. Make sure you keep in mind where your manifest file is. If you’ve been working in your VM with your manifest, make sure you copy it out of your VM before you roll back to your snapshot. Every year I have somebody lose a Puppet manifest file because they rolled back a snapshot and it disappears. So make sure you’re careful there. The other big thing with Puppet manifests is keep it simple. Try and use the Puppet resource command that I show you in several of the labs to query information. And it only sets the things that you care about. For example, if you use Puppet resource to query a user, you might get 30 or 40 things. Most of those are defaults you don’t need to set. you only need to grab the few things that actually need to be set when you’re defining that resource. So you don’t have to be exhaustive about defining these. And so because of that, a model solution for this is less than 200 lines of code each. The other thing to be clear about this, you can make two separate manifest files, one for Ubuntu and one for Windows. You don’t have to make a combined manifest. You totally can if you want, but most students choose to do separate manifest files. So make sure you read those pretty closely. And I’ve got some tips and tricks as well. So hopefully you can get through lab two.
All right, other big thing in this class, I really want you to come at this class with a growth mindset. This is a 500 level technical course. And because of that, it requires you as a student to be up to the challenge and be willing to come at it with a growth mindset. And so what I want you to kind of keep in mind is the labs that I set in this class are meant to be challenging. They are meant to be things that you’ve never done before. And specifically a lot of the labs, I do not give you all of the instructions to do the labs. Especially in system administration, if I give you all of the instructions to do, then this entire class just becomes following along with the things I tell you to click on. There’s no learning that happens. And so I set these challenging labs and then it’s up to you to read the documentation, go through my videos and things and understand what I’m asking you to do and then do that action yourself. So it requires you to grow and change a little bit as a student, as you’re learning how to do these things. I’m not just going to tell you how to do things. If you are stuck, however, feel free to ask for clarification. I’ve told several students that I do not expect anybody to pass this class without asking a question at least once. Unless you have a background in system administration, it is very likely I’m going to say something that you don’t understand. And so that’s a chance to come to me or to Josh and ask for clarification. The other big thing on these labs that I will tell you helps a lot is to start early and work methodically. I heard from a lot of students over the weekend that just started working on the labs on Saturday and Sunday and that’s going to make it really difficult to succeed in this class if you start the weekend. before the labs are due. So start early, work methodically, try and work a little bit every day. And of course, the big thing is make snapshots. If you play video games, you can understand the quality of having a lot of auto saves. Feel free to do the same thing with your snapshots. If you run out of disk space, don’t forget, you can go back and delete older snapshots that you’re not gonna roll back to. That will help save some disk space on your system. So hopefully that helps.
Other than that, feel free to keep in touch. We’ve got great discussions on EdSTEM. I’ve got office hours. I’m available on Zoom anytime. I’m also available via email and on Teams and on Discord. So lots of opportunities to get help. So feel free to reach out and keep in touch. If you do chat with me on either Teams or Discord, feel free to just at me so that I see the notification pop up. That way I actually see it quickly and can get to you. So, other than that, hopefully you’re looking forward to doing Lab 2. I know it feels like you’re having to do Lab 1 again, but that’s really what we kind of want to get across in this lab, is that you can automate a lot of the things that we used to do manually in system administration, and so that’s what we’re going to play with. Hopefully Lab 2 goes well. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, good luck, and I will see you again next week.