Fall '24 Week 11

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Hello, and welcome to the week 11 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2024. This week, you’re working on lab 5, lab 5 is due on Friday. As before, you’ll need to schedule a grading time with either Josh or I to get your lab graded. Lab 5 is pretty straightforward to grade, we’re just going to check some settings on your digital ocean droplets, and then we’re going to make sure that you’ve set up a domain name and have HTTPS working, the Apache sites working, and the Docker sites working. It usually only takes a few minutes to grade if everything’s working correctly. So hopefully you get everything done. Lab 5 is usually a little bit of a downward curve on the difficulty in this class, so hopefully it goes well. Also, don’t forget, our third discussion session is coming up tomorrow, Wednesday this week at 2:30.

So for lab 5 grading, like I said, we just want to see that you can SSH to your front end either from your VM or using the virtual terminal on digital ocean. Once you’re in front end, you should be able to SSH directly from front end to back end just by typing SSH front end and have the key set up there. That’s the big thing we’re going to check. We’re going to check that your firewall is set, your date and time is set correctly. Then on the back end, we’re going to check that Apache is set up with a proper virtual host, has HTTPS working, we’ll check on the front end that your Docker reverse proxy is set up with at least two different hosts there, and then your DNS name should work for all three of those sites as well.

So also coming up this week, we have our third discussion session. Our speaker is Ethan Bergstrom, who works at Oracle Health, formerly Cerner. He works a lot in their hosted provider, so where they provide hosting services for hospitals that want to host their Cerner software on their premises. So Ethan’s got a lot of good background in system administration at a very high, large industrial level, so I’m really excited to bring him back in. He will be here tomorrow on October 30th at 2 .30. If you haven’t already, please go online and fill out some questions that you want to ask Ethan. I have linked his bio and his LinkedIn on the discussion assignment so that you can find that. So feel free to check that out and come prepared with some really good questions for Ethan. Again, that’s tomorrow at 2 .30.

So after this week, we’re gonna switch over to lab six, which is about file servers and application servers. This lab is a little bit more complex than lab five. I will get this posted later on this week so you can get started on it. Basically, we’re going to take both our Windows and our Linux server and add file server capabilities to it. And we’re gonna look at how we can actually automatically map some of those server drives on both systems. Then we’ll also create an application server so that we can install a web application on both. The web application we’re gonna do in DigitalOcean on the Droplets, on Windows we’re gonna do on the Windows server. The goal at the end of this is you should have a working file server and a working application server in both Windows and Linux.

Finally, don’t forget you should be thinking about your final project. The final project in this class is to basically propose either building something or fixing something, and then you’re going to do a SWOT analysis and present a write -up and a proposal in a video about this project. There’s lots of great ideas for the final project out there. The best thing I can tell you is if you’re not sure what you want to do for your final project, start scheduling some time and chat with me for ideas. I’m happy to talk about things. The proposal for your final project is due the Friday before you leave for Thanksgiving break. I will review them pretty early Thanksgiving break week and give you a thumbs up if your final project proposal is approved. Then you can do the SWOT analysis and create the write up and the video proposal of your final project. It should be pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions or concerns, let me know. The other question I’ve gotten a lot on the final project is on grading. The final project is worth 10% of your grade, but it scales linearly. So if you look at your grade at the end of the semester and you’re on track to get an A, if you only get half of your final project, then you can just do either the write up or the video. You don’t have to do both and I will grade it as 50%. So talk to me if you’re not sure about that, but I have some flexibility in your final project. If you know where your grade is going to be, we can work with you to make sure that you’re not overloading yourself if you’ve got other things going on during finals week.

So that’s all I’ve got this week. As always, if you have any questions, you can keep in touch with me on Ed discussion, Discord teams and come to office hours. We’re always happy to help. Otherwise, I hope you’re having a good time getting through this class. We got Halloween week coming up, so hopefully you’ve got some fun plans for Halloween. Best of luck this week and I will see you again next week.