Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week 10 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. So this week you should get started on working on lab five, which is our first lab completely done in the cloud and DigitalOcean. That lab is going to be due next Friday by 5 p .m. So make sure you get that done and are scheduled to get that graded. We also have our next discussion session coming up, not this Wednesday, but next Wednesday, October 30th.
So make sure you take a look at that and start thinking of some questions for our guest speaker. For lab five, the grading that we’re looking at is basically your ability to connect to the front end either via SSH or via the cloud terminal that’s available on DigitalOcean. From front end, you should be able to SSH to back end by just typing SSH back end. That confirms that you’re using an SSH key and that you have an SSH config file that is working correctly. We’re going to check the firewall settings on both systems as well as the date and time being set correctly. On the back end, you’re going to have Apache set up and you’re going to have at least one virtual host running in Apache. We’ll check to make sure your DNS and HTTPS is working on that system. And then on the front end, you’re going to run a Docker reverse proxy of some kind and have two front end websites working there as well. Those won’t be using HTTPS because we’re using a reverse proxy that may not support HTTPS directly, but hopefully you can get that up and running and be able to show the CIS 527, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie websites working on your domain name.
For next week, we also have a discussion coming up. We’ve got our speaker, Ethan Bergstrom. Ethan Bergstrom works at Oracle Health, previously Cerner, works in the IT department. He actually manages a lot of their cloud infrastructure for hosting their health system for small and medium hospitals across the country. He does a lot of stuff at this large scale of system administration, being on call, working on performance tuning, working on monitoring and maintenance of these large systems. He has a wealth of knowledge, and so I’m really excited to bring Ethan in to talk about what he does in the IT world. That talk is going to be… Wednesday, October 30th at 2 .30 PM. I’ve posted a little bit of his bio and also a link to his LinkedIn on Canvas so you can learn a little bit more about Ethan and his background and write some really good questions to ask Ethan. You can also see a video that he did about four years ago, the last time I brought him in. I know things have changed a lot since then, so I’m really excited to see what he’s been working on.
Then the next lab, we’re gonna switch to Lab 6 in a couple of weeks. Lab 6 is kind of a hybrid lab where we’re going to work on file servers and drive mappings in VMware. We’re also going to work on building an application server both on the Windows server that you did the Active Directory domain on, and we’re going to work on adding some web apps to our digital ocean droplets as well. That lab is not posted yet. I need to make a few updates to that lab based on some changes this year, but I’ll try and get that posted within the next week or so so that if you’re working a little bit ahead, you can get started on Lab 6 soon.
Finally, the other big thing to think about in this class is this class does include a final project and the final project is coming up in about a month. The idea for the final project in this class is mostly a thought exercise. I don’t expect you to actually build something or fix something, but what I expect you to do is propose something that you want to do. And that proposal could be about building something IT related or fixing something IT related. It could be designing a web resource for a new startup company. It could be a way to automatically set up laptops for school. It could be a central authentication system for a company or nonprofit. It could be a discussion of whether you should have thin clients versus thick clients in computer labs. Anything that you can think of that revolves around anything that we’ve talked about in IT so far is a fair game for the final project. The final project itself consists of three parts. The first part, you’re going to do a SWOT analysis, which is a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis of your proposal. So you kind of have to define your proposal, define your scope and what you’re trying to propose. Do an analysis of it. You’ll make a writeup of your analysis that includes your SWOT analysis in that writeup. It’s kind of a technical white paper style of writeup. You kind of pretend that I’m your CIO or CTO and you’re trying to convince me that this is a good idea. Or likewise, you may convince me that this is a bad idea that we don’t want to do it based on your SWOT analysis.
The only thing that you’ll actually do in the tech field is you’re going to make some sort of a proof of concept for your idea. So for example, if your idea is to migrate all of K -State systems to Azure, then your proof of concept might be to build a system on Azure just to show that you have a little familiarity working with Azure. Likewise, if you’re looking at antivirus clients, you might in a VM install a few different antivirus clients and decide which one of those you want to use. That’s kind of the idea for the final project. What you’ll do is you’ll submit your writeup and a short video talking about your project. That’s really all it takes. If you have any questions or aren’t sure about any ideas, you can schedule a time to chat with me. I’m happy to work with you to try and find an idea. The ideas themselves are due before Thanksgiving break. That gives me a quick time to take a look at your idea. And then it gives you a couple of weeks around Thanksgiving. giving before the finals week to actually write up and do your SWOT analysis and things like that. The final project is only 10% of your grade, so I don’t expect you to spend more than about a week or two on it. It’s mainly meant to take the place of a last lab assignment which are also about 10% of your grade.
So for lab five, you’re going to be using DigitalOcean for cloud providers. If you don’t have a DigitalOcean account, I encourage you to get signed up for one ASAP. You can go to this link, try .digitalocean .com slash free trial offer. That should get you a hundred free credits there. If you want, I also have a signup link that you can email me for. I have a code that gets you a $200. free trial, it does give me $25 back if you spend $25 with DigitalOcean. So I don’t put it on here, but if you want it, ask me for it and I can get you a link that will get you $200 of free credit on DigitalOcean. The other thing that you’ll do is you’ll register a domain name. You can do that through Namecheap by going to nc .me and signing up with your ksu .edu email account, which gets you a free .me domain for the first year. Both of these are optional. I can’t make you spend any money in this class. So if you don’t want to do that, please let me know. I can set you up as a subdomain under mycis527 .org domain. And likewise, I can set you up as a sub team under my DigitalOcean account. I prefer that you set your own up because I think it’s really cool that by the end of the semester, you’ll have your own web hosting, your own domain name. You can set up your own website, however you want to do it. But if you don’t want to do that or you’re concerned about signing up for any of these things, let me know. And I have options for you as well.
So that’s really all I’ve got this week. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. I’m available on ed discussion. There’s already a lab five mega thread out there that you can post in. You can chat with me on Discord or Teams. You can come to Tea Time office hours. And as always, we have our one -on -one office hours as well. I’ll definitely have office hours this Wednesday if you have any questions on lab five. So feel free to stop by. We’re kind of nearing the end of the semester. Hopefully things are going well. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, I will see you again next week.