Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week six announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2024. This week we have our second discussion session hosted on Wednesday, so we’ll talk about that in just a minute. Next Wednesday the response for that discussion is due and the questions for that discussion are due this Wednesday right before we start. And then also next Wednesday lab three is due as well. So for lab three, which you should be working on this week is adding some core network services to our Ubuntu VMs. You’re going to set static IP addresses. You’re going to install a DNS server and a DHCP server. You’re also going to install SNMP so that you can view some of your network statistics across the network. You’ll also install Wireshark and use that to capture some packets. All of this is really useful stuff to understand how networking services work.
Some big hints for lab three are to look at the hints and diagrams that I have, especially at the end of the textbook. There’s a lot of good hints there. And when all else fails, I encourage you to ask questions. Definitely one thing I’m seeing in this class is a lot of students are starting the lab assignments the day it’s due or the day before it’s due. And then they’re running in the questions and it takes a little time back and forth to get those questions answered. It’s much, much easier if you start these labs a bit early so that if you do run into problems or get frustrated, you can take a break, you can ask questions, you can come back to it when you’ve got a fresh mind. That’s really one of the big things to do in this class is take advantage of the fact that you have a full two week period to work on these labs and try and work on them a little bit at a time instead of trying to run it all in one shot.
So as a quick reminder for lab three, we’re going to do live grading again this time. So you’ll need to schedule a time to meet with either Josh or I to get lab three graded. As before, please check Josh’s calendar first. He’s most likely to have the most available time and be able to meet with you next week to get the lab graded. If he’s not available or his times don’t work for you, check my calendar and schedule some time with me. As a fair warning, I’m usually very busy Mondays and Tuesdays. So it’s hard to get time on my calendar those days. My calendar opens up later in the week, but it does mean that it’s after the deadline for lab three. So just be aware of that. When we do grading for lab three, we’re gonna ask you to show us several things. We wanna see that you can do remote connections using RDP to connect to your Windows machine, using SSH to connect to one of your Ubuntu machines. You should be able to show that you have a static IP on your Ubuntu VM labeled server. To be clear about that, you don’t have to install the server version of Ubuntu on that VM. You can use the desktop version just like we’ve been using, but you should name it as a server so that we’re gonna treat it like that. You should be able to show your DNS server settings and we’ll have you run some commands to do some DNS lookups to make sure your DNS server is working. We’ll check your DHCP settings, and we’ll also check to make sure your VMs are getting DHCP addresses from your DHCP server. And then we’ll also look for some screenshots of your SNMP process and your Wireshark process as well. You don’t have to show us those. You should be able to just show us the screenshots of those things, and then we’ll look at your screenshots real quick and make sure that they show exactly what we’re looking for.
All right. So after that we’re going to switch to Lab 4. Lab 4 is notoriously one of the more difficult labs in this class because you start working with Windows Server. And so in Lab 4 you’re going to set up a VM for Windows Server. For those of you that are working on Apple Silicon Max, you’ll want to do this in Azure. And I’ll be posting some videos later this week or early next week to show the process of doing this in Azure. For those of you that don’t have Apple Silicon Max, but if you want to play around with Azure, you can definitely do this in Azure. Just make sure that you have your student credits available in Azure. And if not, let me know. And we’re trying to figure out a way to renew those credits. So I’m working on that, but hopefully that should work for everybody. What we’re going to do on Windows is we’re going to set up an Active Directory server so that we can use that. That’s kind of the default standard for doing this shared logins on Windows. On Ubuntu we’re going to set up an OpenLDAP server. We’re going to configure clients to connect to those. And we also do one example of interoperability where we’re actually going to add an Ubuntu VM into our Windows Active Directory to show how that works. As with all of these labs, it’s really, really important that you make snapshots early and make snapshots often, especially when you’re doing the Active Directory and OpenLDAP installation part. If either of those fail, it’s really hard to undo them and try again. It’s much, much better to just roll back to a snapshot and try again. So make sure you make ample use of snapshots if you can as you’re going through that process.
So again, to be successful in this class, you really need to read the labs carefully. Take a look at all the post -it hints and resources. A lot of times in the lab assignments, if I ask you to do something and then below that I have a few links to resources, those are the documentation resources I read when I have to do this. And so it gives you a good idea of what I think is valuable resource versus just going out to Google and taking the first result that you find. I’ve tried to curate a list of resources that I find to be particularly useful and helpful for setting these up. But of course, things may not make sense. So if you get stuck, ask questions, if I can clarify something, if I can give you a little bit more direct hint, I’m happy to do that. You just have to ask some questions. The other big thing I’d students to do in this class is don’t spin your wheels. If you feel like you’re working on a project and you haven’t gotten anywhere in about a half hour or so, like if you just run up against a wall and you’re not making any progress, don’t sit there and spin your wheels for four or five hours. I always hate to hear that students have spent like five hours trying to debug a problem and then they email me and it’s a very simple fix that I can help them with. Don’t waste that five hours getting frustrated and spinning your wheels trying to solve a problem. It is totally possible in this class for you to come up against a problem that I’ve never seen before and it’s very difficult to debug. I would say every semester I have at least two or three students come up with a problem that is brand new that I’ve never seen before that we sometimes have to spend some time debugging if we can or we try and come up with a workaround. So it’s part of just working in a system administration class is we’re always going to get weird stuff. So if you get stuck, don’t spin your wheels, ask us questions. We’re more than happy to help you get unstuck. And I’d much rather do that than hear that a student gets frustrated trying to solve an area that they can’t even solve. So just be aware of that that is totally possible for those things to happen and we’re here to help.
So our speaker this week is Seth Galitzer. Seth is going to join us Wednesday at 2:30 for our discussion time. Seth Galitzer is the computer science support person. He works on all of our computer systems in computer science. He maintains our research systems, our servers, our desktop clients. He maintains everything for all of our department to function. He’s been doing that role for several years at this point. And so I really value Seth’s opinion and advice on things. So I’m really looking forward to have Seth come in and talk about his background and his experience as a computer support person. And again, that’s this Wednesday at 2 .30. Make sure you go in and write a couple of questions that you’d like to ask Seth and submit those to get your points for the discussion questions. And then you can either attend the live session and ask him a question to get your response points or you can watch the video afterwards, write a quick response and submit it. I’ll try and get that posted usually within an hour at the end of the meeting on Wednesday.
So that’s all I’ve got for today. Please feel free to keep in touch on Ed discussion, discord, teams, tea time, office hours. One other thing I wanted to mention in this class is I’ve gotten a lot of responses from the start -top stop continue survey to hold more office hours for this class. It’s really difficult to do that because of the asynchronous nature of this class. We don’t have a dedicated time where a lot of students are available and the few times in the past where I have held office hours. For example, I did office hours last Wednesday. We had one student drop in. And so it’s really difficult to do scheduled office hours for a class like this, which is why we have one -on -one office hours available all the time. Both Josh and I have a calendly setup that has all of our times available. So anytime you have a question and want to actually meet with us one -on -one, you can schedule a time on office hours. You can post on ed discussion. You can post on teams. We’re readily available to help you. And I find that that’s a much better use of our time than having these scheduled office hours. that nobody is able to show up for because it doesn’t match their schedule. So just keep that in mind. Likewise, if you’re working full -time and you wanna meet with me after hours, just email me and let me know. I’m available after hours. I just don’t have that available on my calendly because let’s face it, if I made those hours available, they would always get booked up and it would be hard for me to have a life outside of school. So I don’t make those openly available, but I do have times available in the evenings if you email me and ask for those. So that’s all I’ve got. I hope you don’t find this lab too frustrating. I know that labs three and four can be some of the more difficult labs in this class. I kind of front load some of the difficulty just to get over the hump and then you can get to some of the fun stuff toward the end of the semester. So as always, if you have any questions, let us know and I will see you again next week.