Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 6 Learning Journal #6/#38 for the week Wed 10/05-Tues 10/12, year 2021

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 6 Learning Journal #6/#38 for the week Wed 10/05-Tues 10/12, year 2021

This week's learning is a LOT of terminology and unfamiliar acronyms. Here is a quote from one of the assignments:

Nevermind, that is a bad idea, there could be copywrite issues. Read this related wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address

The topics this week ranged from a multi-client python socket connection demo program with a chat spinoff as a group project to IPv6 to OpenFlow and routing algorithms, and I didn't fully understand the labs I don't think but it seemed like we were rewiring the virtual switches/routers to just work exactly as we specified them to. That was a very interesting topic and I'd really like to understand more about what we were doing there in the software defined network.

Group work went well and we landed ourselves with two really interesting programs, python multi-threaded locking sockets and an even simpler chat server we built out of that.

With all the IPv6 addresses and terminology that goes with them the material looks awesomely complex. I can pretend to be smart while throwing around network mechanics acronyms nobody has any idea what they mean.

But what I'd like to know is how do the pros learn all of this stuff? It is a serious mass of information! I'd like to know what it would take to some day be able to get to the point where you could say lets design some of the stuff they're leading us through.

The software defined network commands MiniNet has seem extremely robust. Last week we had a python script to throw in there I forgot to talk about I think that made a custom MiniNet network environment, scripted by a python file.

Perhaps with more reading and more familiarity I will start to wrap my mind around some of the terms and acronyms they're starting to throw around and why.

Practice with Dijkstra's algorithm was really good and doing it on the homework quiz helped me and presumably all of us go from seeing a bunch of code on the page to understanding exactly what it does, once you go through the algorithm you just get it. Basically go through everything updating each path with the latest newest closest and at the end add the newest shortest one to a running list. I couldn't have said that before the homework, now it's crystal clear what's happening.

It was also a really big family week with lots and lots of good but also lots of bad mixed in, too, unfortunately, with a 97 year old dad, but luckily we're trucking through, the material here in class gold and I was able to barely keep on top of everything by the skin of my teeth. I'm really excited about being able to devour these topics and hopefully come out understanding more in the end for it!

Thanks for reading!