hmmm, just got an email about a USPS delivery, need to print a label and take it to the post office.
but hey, the mail from domain is buran7.beget.ru, and the payload or link i need to click on is missing from the message.
whew, guess i dodged a bullet there.
Deferring again talking about implications of online content...
There are two different ways to play a Networking course. Is the room full of potential Network engineers, or is it full of potential application developers? It makes a difference.
In the case of UAlbany, the course is offered in the framework of the Computer Science department, and the students tend to be mostly software oriented. This means that I should be trying to make them comfortable with socket programming paradigms, which are a bit different from straight line single threaded development exercises. Socket programming is also what many (most?) of the full time faculty think the course is supposed to be about.
But this doesn't excuse me from teaching a lot of the lower level stuff. I've encountered a few too many software developers, who while competent on the development side, are more than a little vague on how some of the networking stuff actually operates. You can write a socket program without understanding how the client side determines a port number, but you may find yourself at a loss when trying to use tools like nmap, tcpdump and wireshark to poke at your application with a stick, and may be pretty clueless about firewall setup as well. So at the bare minimum we need to talk about IP and friends, and it makes little sense to leave out layers 1 & 2 (ISO model) when talking about everything above them.
So the future evolution of the course will need to improve on the socket programming side while still providing the students with a solid foundation in how the various layers in the reference model work.
And there will always be a need to cover things like clocks and NTP because I can't see them encountering that stuff anywhere else before they graduate and move out into the real world.
I'm going to defer the promised posting about the implications of the online content of some of the Pearson books for now, in part because I'm going to be getting evaluation copies of some Morgan-Kaufman books and they have online content as well, best to go through both sets of terms and conditions and think about what they mean first. In the meantime, here's the Syllabus from this past spring - one task will be to compare the syllabus with the content of each book to compare coverage.
- Introduction to Concepts & History of Data Networks
- Protocol Layering, OSI and ARPANet reference models
- Client/Server model, Socket concepts and Socket programming
- using SSH
- Introduction to Information Theory, Compression and Error Detection
- Layer 1 & 2 - The Physical Network
- Layer 3 & 4 - Transport - IP, TCP and friends
- Queuing Theory
- Network devices
- Routing Protocols
- Dynamic Host Control Protocol - DHCP
- Domain Name Service - DNS
- Network Time Protocol - NTP
- Resource Identifiers - URIs and URLs
- Document Transport - FTP & HTTP
- EMail
- Network abuse
- Encryption & Security
- Digital Certificates
- Diffie-Hellman
- SSL/TLS
- IPSec
- DNSSEC
- Authentication - AAA
- Firewalls
- ASN.1
- SNMP
- LDAP
- peer-to-peer networks - BitTorrent, BitCoin