Arlon's CSUMB Blog

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 8 Learning Journal #8/#40 for the week Wed 10/19-Tues 10/26, year 2021 The topics this week are final, group project... That class was invaluable, I'm extremely glad to have been exposed to those topics. That was a lot of information, and very extremely good and useful information. I still feel like it's 1/10,000th of what people that design routers and chips know. But now at least I know how to design a software defined network, and use it for testing and experimenting on network topologies. That is extremely interesting to me, although I'm still not exactly sure how to affix the SDN to my home/office network as a virtual add-on. Or... am I...if I can SSH in from localhost, maybe I can just ssh in ... to ... the sdn by using the localhost ip address to ssh in from other network areas! That's it! Instead of mininet@localhost it's going to be mininet@192.168.x.y! Ok now I'm reall...

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 7 Learning Journal #7/#39 for the week Wed 10/12-Tues 10/19, year 2021 The topics this week are ARP, DHCP, subnetting, CRC calculations for error checking, layer 2, link layer, frames, wireshark, python, mininet, arp tables, subnet addresses, and the subnetting in particular I've been waiting for, so although I'm currently a hair stuck getting out group project to work, I'm super excited about that simultaneously because then once I get it hopefully I'll have something new figured out - it's something with adding routes, I'm not doing that right (yet). Group work is going great and we are trucking through out second week of designing a dhcp network with multiple subnets, routing table additions, python scripted mininet topology and plenty of built-in puzzles to figure out to make it all super fun. CodeAnywhere is working out as a decent team-online-IDE. It's not perfect (we...

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, ...

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 w...

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 4 Learning Journal #4/#36 for the week Wed 09/22-Tues 09/28, year 2021 This week we finished our group assignment, teamwork was excellent, team members found bugs where there weren't supposed to be bugs, and we got it all done well and on time. This is a pinger client written in python - they give you server python that's a pinger responder and we wrote a client - a little research on how python sockets should timeout, a little research on python language details, and it runs in our virtual software-defined network environment, MiniNet. We had a midterm test this week and what was cool is, in some classes it can sometimes be a bit of a mystery what we're going to get tested on, especially in classes with a barrage of information overload like this class has to a degree. But in this class, they gave us plenty of practice problems to use ahead of time to practice our knowledge on the material and warm u...

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 3 Learning Journal #3/#35 for the week Wed 09/15-Tues 09/21, year 2021 This week we got a new group assignment, threads waiting for ping responses in python, and immediately utilized excellent team work to nearly complete the project in half the time we were allotted. I don't usually say this but in this case we literally all helped reason through everything and got most of the spec completed more quickly as a team than I was going on my own. It's not completely done but we got super far, super quickly, and I personally was stumped on what I was trying to figure out until team members helped me reason through and figure it out. We are trying out codeanywhere and it has some glitches, some bad glitches, but it's such useful software (like google docs but with code-capability) that we're basically overlooking it's flaws and quirks. I even overlooked them to the point where I gave them money ...

Arlon's CSUMB Intro to Computer Networks CST-311 Module 2 Learning Journal #2/#34 for the week Wed 09/08-Tues 09/14, year 2021 This week we were able to finalize the sockets with python program both with TCP and UDP and also running off Mininet, I did a third way running the server programs from Mininet the OS and outside the VM my computer's localhost was the client - you have to port forward that port for that to work, with the protocol you're using. That wasn't part of the assignment, but I thought it was for a while until I read everything over again and asked the professor. So then that illuminated another way I wanted to try and haven't accomplished yet because I'm still not sure of the details. It's at the bottom of the Mininet walkthrough http://mininet.org/walkthrough/ under Using a Remote Controller It says to create a software network you can get in from outside of the virtual machine you can start Mininet with something like: ...