CST 311 Week 3

Week 3

I got behind a bit this week due to the lab taking me a long time. Many of the prompts that we were supposed to perform didn't work because the DNS servers were no longer public or no longer existed. I made the best of it and used alternate ones and also relied on the results that the author of the Wireshark labs had received. I also work on OSX, so I've had to find the equivalent commands of those that are provided in the lab (Windows commands).

The content covered this week was SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), DNS (Domain Name Service) and how various applications utilize these. These are all very relevant to what I've been doing at work. Coworkers have explained parts of these to me, but I just didn't completely understand some of the tools I was using. I've enjoyed becoming more familiar with the tools that have been presented this week. I've used ifconfig (ipconfig equivalent) at work to find my IP address at work pretty frequently.

We watched a video, called "A Day in the Life of an Application", that explains how some services work. I really enjoyed learning how a voice call works over Skype and how peer-to-peer sharing work. I'd heard of (and used) peer-to-peer sharing systems in the past and never really understood what was going on under the hood. I love the idea of being able to obtain data from several people that are also downloading the same content. Now I understand why you'd want to have many people downloading the same thing. All I used to understand was that it was faster and more likely to complete when there were more users.