Between this last week and this week it's the final push for the intro to computer networks course. The final this last weekend and this week is the wrapping up of our last group project and classwork on firewalls. This past week covered the link layer, both in physical hardware and software. I enjoyed exploring more about the slotted ALOHA protocol. We covered how ARP allows us to translate IP addresses to MAC addresses, allowing IP-layer communication to occur over the link layer. This class was a fun exploration into a much deeper networking world than I had once been aware of, and truly makes you appreciate all the smaller systems that work hand in hand to bring us the internet (and other computer networks) as we know them today.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Intro to Computer Networks - Week 6
This week focused on understanding how packets ended up where they need to be, were we want them to be. We covered routing algorithms like link-state or distance-vector. Learned about routing inside an autonomous system and routing outside with open shortest path first, and between autonomous systems with BGP (border gateway protocol). We learned about Software Defined Networking at the control plane.
Also, somehow it's already time for the Final this weekend. This class has packed a lot of information in its 6 weeks thus far, but it's been a good learning experience.
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Intro to Computer Networks - Week 5
This week we concluded our second group programming assignment, the TCP Chat Server. It was a fun assignment in creating a chat server and client program to communication over a TCP socket. There were some intricacies in handling different states cleanly, but our group worked well together to get it done. In class work this week, we covered the network layer. We learned about how packets are routed and hopefully eventually reach their target end destination. We spent time understanding how IP addresses work, both IPv4 and IPv6, how they're assigned and what they mean. Other topics that were covered were software defined networking,