Cody Codes Code

Over this past weekend and part of this week, I took the midterm exam and finished a short lab on looking at UDP segments in Wireshark, along with reading a section on programming a simple TCP/UDP client-server demonstration program in Python. The midterm was not different overall, but I lost a lot of points on the bottleneck/client-server throughput and bandwidth questions, so I need to spend more time studying those concepts again before the final exam. There were also a few questions I missed about certain details I overlooked in the book or video lectures. I believe my grade reflects accurately the amount of time I spent preparing for the exam, but it would've been much higher had I gotten the block of questions about client-server bandwidth correct. The lab was short in comparison to previous weeks, which is understandable since preparing for the midterm was our class's priority this week. Learning about the technical details of UDP such as header length and bit fields

It has been quite a busy week! This week, we learned more about transport layer services, including both TCP and UDP, and in this week's lab I looked at the details of DNS queries and they are sent and received across networks. DNS and I have had a love-hate relationship in the past, as when I was a sophomore at UCSB I had a lot of trouble that year getting my desktop connected properly to the school's network because my motherboard at the time had some wonky Ethernet adapter settings that caused every DNS query to be rejected by my school's servers. It took an entire day of troubleshooting and some help from my close friends who were computer engineering undergrads at the time, and if it weren't for them I would've had to buy a WiFi adapter or resort to using my spare laptop all year.  What strikes me the most about DNS queries is how they are normally sent over UDP instead of TCP, only switching to TCP once packet sizes reach over a certain byte limit (I think

This week, we learned more about Internet protocols, basics about HTTP/TCP requests, what different messages are composed of and how application level protocols work to deliver content over networks. I found the article about P2P clients and streaming websites the most interesting because I watch streaming video and listen to streaming music all the time, yet never looked into the technical details about how it worked. This week's lab also involved using Wireshark to sniff and read HTTP response and request packets. I use Wireshark sometimes at work so I was already familiar with looking at the structure of these HTTP headers, but in the past I have never needed to look at anything more than IP addresses so learning about the types of data and response codes returned in these header files was useful.  

Time for the start of a new class! Last week kicked off CST 311, which is an introductory class to Internet Programming and how it works. I know the basics of the Internet enough to get around, but learning about the infrastructure of the Internet, how all of its components work together, and the basis of delivering content through the web is something that is quite important to me, both personally and professionally, and especially because I have never studied it in depth before. I am looking forward to the next eight weeks.