Network Infrastructure - Net2010I (MSCS6310)

Table 1.

What are you going to study?

We are going to focus in this semester on what will be called the infrastructure of networks. That is, the hardware that we use to interconnect them, the concepts on which our communication over these connections is based, and the protocols that prescribe the behavior of examples of those concepts.

Why are you going to study it?

All computing is now based upon networking, whether we realize it or not. Communicating with peripheral devices such as disk drives, or terminal devices such as keyboards or displays or sound cards, is based upon the same principals as communicating across a wired ethernet or a wireless network. Although at a high level you need not, and should not, be aware of what is going on in the lower levels, you will often find that there are major limitations, or possibilities, at a higher level, based upon the properties of the infrastructure in use, so a general understanding of that infrastructure is always very helpful.

The situation is very similar to one that is already quite familiar to most of us, from the time we are born. In computing we do not encounter this so early in life (although the initial encounter is getting earlier every year) so we may not realize its importance. The familiar situation is that of plain old human transportation. From very early in our lives we know the difference between being carried and carrying ourselves, being conveyed in vehicles or on animals (yes, your parents are animals underneath:-), and what the possibilities opened to us, or closed to us, by travelling on airplanes or horses. The situation is the same with the transport of ideas and information, but we are somewhat less familiar with those forms of transport. So part of a course like this should be to show us what is involved, and help us later to understand what it means even for those who only wish to focus upon applications.

How are you going to study it?

Your instructor believes that the only way to learn is to do (although unfortunately for you your instructor is one of the worst at forcing people to do things). I am going to constantly suggest things you should do, and these suggestions are based upon substantial experience with students of every background. It is however going to be up to you to do those things, and to ask questions if you problems.

Note

Never be afraid to admit to me that you are having problems: if you are not I suspect from years of experience you are not trying anything.

Note

On the other hand I do not appreciate your telling me you are having problems if you have never even tried. The hardest part initially about most of this is that you need to get over the fear of feeling like an idiot: you are an idiot, so am I, and we are both trying to get a bit past that stage! For those of you who have learned to ride a bicycle, the hardest part at first was just to get on the thing, probably only to be dumped unceremoniously onto the ground. For those who now know how, that very seldom happens, and we have turned to something better that we can do on our bicycle. But none of it would happen if we did not get on the first time.

Note

So let me know what you have done, but do not let me know what you were afraid to even try.

Note

The second problem comes because you may be used to doing things to learn because the instructor made you do them, and constantly checked that you had done so. This instructor feels awful if you have been struggling to learn and he has not been able to help you, and feels nothing if you have not been struggling. Sadly he does not feel the need to punish you for your lack of effort, so it may be easy for you to "get by" without doing much. You will be the loser someday when the knowledge you could have gained would have helped you.

Note

Finally, please don't tell me you didn't do something because the pressure of some other class was greater so you put off the work for this class. That involves your lack of judgment and control, not my lack of supervision. My hope is that someday you will find yourself comfortable with all sorts of topics that others see as revolutionary, and you see as just new illustrations of things you learned here: but that will not happen if you did not learn them here!

Setting up your account

I added this section to point to a description of what you should do to get started with your student account. You can do your work wherever you want, my recommendation for most of you is that you login to our student machine pascal.mscs.mu.edu ahd make yourself a directory called Net2010I and do your work there.

At some point you will want to publish your Assignments so I can read them, and the page customizeHow tells you what to do.

Since I really do not care about the "bells and whistles" (this is a course in networking, not in web design) I have prepared an entire set of files that you can just copy in to the directory you create to get started. It has the world's simplest home page, and it has 12 bare assignment pages. You can just edit them to put in what you have done, or point to other pages showing what you have done. Or you can do a much better job yourself. This is just posted so none of you are blocked from learning networks because you do not yet know how to create websites!

Get into your $HOME/public_html/Net2010I directory, and execute the following command:

unzip /work/web/WWW/Net2010I/zoo/mysite.zip

and in your directory will appear a Santa and eight tinyXXXXXXXXXXXX an index.html page and 12 pages of the form N.html. You can then "fix these up" as needed for you assignments.