Fall '25 Week 10
Resources
Video Script
Hello and welcome to the week 10 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC510 in fall 2025. So this week today we’ve got our second discussion. It’s really our third discussion, but it’s discussion two and the announcements. We’ll talk about that. That’s coming up today. Then this Friday your response for discussion three that was last week is going to be due as well as the quizzes for lab five. So make sure you’re watching all those due dates on Canvas.
So like we talked about last week, lab five, we’re going to move into the cloud. We’re going to create two droplets on DigitalOcean. We’re going to set up things like SSH and firewall rules. And then we’re going to set up some simple Apache websites. And we’re also going to do some work with Docker and set up a reverse proxy to a couple of Docker websites. So this is a little bit lower in terms of difficulty with Lab 4, but if it’s the first time you’ve worked in the cloud and worked with all these online services, there’s still quite a bit of learning to do with this lab. So be aware of that. But hopefully this lab works out really well.
So for grading on lab five, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure that we can SSH to your front end and to your back end. For the SSH to front end, if you’re on campus, you’ll just have to use the virtual console. We won’t be able to directly SSH to it. That’s fine. But your front end should be able to SSH to your back end. That’s part of the setup. We’re going to check firewall. We’re going to check for Apache, DNS, HTTPS, and the reverse proxy for Docker. All of it should be pretty straightforward. If you have any questions on it, let me know.
So don’t forget for this lab, you may want to use some things from the GitHub Education Pack. For example, in DigitalOcean, if you go to the free trial offer website, you can get up to $200 in free credit for 60 days. If you go to nc.me, you can register for a .me domain for $11. If you want my referral links for any of these, I’m happy to share them with you. But at worst, even if you have to pay for everything out of pocket, your total cost for this should be about $11. As always, if this presents a hardship for you or if you’re concerned about using any of these online resources, please let me know. I do have alternative options out there, but I’m really encouraging you to play with some of these real world surfaces because I think it’s a really great way to learn how to do all these things in the cloud. And I think this is one of the more straightforward ways to do it.
So another question that’s come up a couple of times is the final project. Hopefully you have noticed in this class that there is a final project coming up at the end of the semester. So big short version of the final project is it is 90% a thought exercise. What I want you to do is make an IT proposal toward me, pretending that I’m your CIO and you’re trying to propose something you want to do in IT. You can build something or you can fix something. Some examples would be like a web resource for a new startup company, setting up laptops for a school, designing a central authentication system for a company, discussing whether you want to replace the thin clients in a lab with thick clients, discussing what antivirus you want to use, what cloud providers you want to use, tons of stuff. Basically what this project is, propose an IT project, and then instead of doing the project, what you’re going to do is a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to show me that you have thought through this project really well and that you can explain to me as your CIO what the benefits are of this project, what the drawbacks of this project are. And your goal is to try and convince me that this project is a good idea. Like I said, it’s 90% of thought exercise. It’s just making the proposal, going through the analysis, doing some reading, doing some research, presenting your materials. And then there’s about 10% of it that is really actually doing a small proof of concept.
So for example, if you’re playing around with an antivirus system, for example, you might load up a VM and install two or three different antivirus systems in there just to play around with them. If you’re doing a web resource for a new startup, you might throw a web resource up on a Docker instance or an AWS instance. It doesn’t have to be much. It should take you just a couple hours, but I want you to at least show me that you’ve played around with this idea or tinkered with it a little bit so that your analysis really makes sense with what your real world expectations are. If you’re having trouble coming up with a final project, you can chat with me for ideas. The big thing that you’re going to turn in is a written report and then also a recorded presentation that’s about 10 to 15 minutes in length that is going over the highlights in your report. That’s really what I’m looking for. And as always, if you have any questions on this, let me know.
So today we’ve got our second discussion session, which is going to be Kyle Hudson. Kyle Hudson currently works at Lambda Labs, but formerly worked as a Bayochet admin and also as an IT person for Canren. He’s going to come in and talk about his experience working on high-performance computing. Kyle is always a very engaging speaker, so I hope everybody can make it today. And remember, that is today at 2.30. Other than that, keep in touch with me if you have any questions. I’m available just about everywhere you try and find me. But otherwise, we’re kind of nearing the end of the semester. It is week 10 out of 16. So hopefully you can start to feel that we’re getting there. As always, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, best of luck. And I will see you again next week.