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CST 311 - Week 3

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 it is 512 bytes). Logically, I would assume these queries would require handshaking and other types of reliability checks characteristic of TCP, but at the same time I figure raw speed and less overhead processing is important in sending queries and receiving responses quickly.

 I also spent much of the end of last week and will continue for the rest of this week preparing for the midterm. My group members feel relatively confident yet nervous about it at the same time, and I feel the same way. I am sure with enough preparation we'll do a great job on it. 

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