Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 5 Learning Journal #5/#37 for the week Wed 09/29-Tues 10/05

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 5 Learning Journal #5/#37 for the week Wed 09/29-Tues 10/05, year 2021

It's working! I can finally read about networking on help pages on the internet and understand what I'm reading now - it's like all of a sudden I can understand spanish but it's networking - now I just got to work on my spanish... I can go to various web pages now and read about networking and now what would have used to have boggled my mind I am starting to be able to just understand normally.

That is really good because I've been trying to figure a lot of this stuff out (one of my questions early on was, what's with a setting that's always the same ie 255.255.255.0, now I finally get it! Maybe you have a tiny two switch network and you want only 2 ip addresses, you can end it with 254, and to answer my question of all the 255's, that's why the shorthand, ending in 254 is shorthandedly written /31 - the slash is just to designate it's a netmask. )

I also wanted to know, for years, until this week, how in the world do clients (hosts) get their ip addresses? We learned this week! I knew, essentially, already, but I thought there was more to, so it really helped to just be told exactly how it works finally, because it didn't seem fully normal until it was said, directly in lecture: IP addresses can either be requested in the OS settings (Windows, Linux or Mac, etc) or just assigned at random, by their DHCP server (usually your home router). That's officially true. I've observed it, time and time again I just for some reason thought there was more to it than that, but I guess there isn't. Just set the IP address in the settings, and if it's available, then it can have that address.

This week we got a new group assignment, multi-client socket connecting in python, and it is a super interesting problem and an extremely exciting project to be involved with. Long ago when I created my game Super Bomb Reversi I tried to get a bare-bones socket example program working and I was unable, falling back on to the overall less expensive option, COMET and got that to do what I wanted, instead, with less overhead, so overall it was better, just saying, sockets are a really interesting project to experiment with and not easy to get working without help so, thanks to this class, I can now get all that working.

Anyways, in summary, the week of studying networking topics was long awaited, ranging from how DHCP works to how subnets and subnet terminology works to how IPv6 and a lot more complicated of a sockets example in Python, utilizing threads so two clients can connect, an extremely useful and applicable topic. Fragmentation was also a sub-topic.

Thanks for reading!