CST 311 Week 5

Week 5

This week was pretty intense content-wise. This has been the most challenging course for me in this program, but I am happy about it. I feel like I'm walking away each week with a new understanding of how the internet is working. It definitely helps me feel more in-tune with my surroundings at work, too. This week at work we have been having some frustrating issues with the VPN client, Pulse (Juniper Networks). It drops a lot of packets when a particular packet size is sent. If I recall correctly, it's hitting the congestion window size. I didn't understand all of the specifics of it, but I could at least somewhat follow the conversation around it and I thank this course for that.

This week we covered TCP's sequence numbers and acknowledgements, reliable data transfer, connection management, and TCP's congestion control algorithm. However, I heavily focused on TCP's congestion control algorithm. There was a quiz this week that was pretty difficult for me after reading the textbook and re-watching videos on the topic, but I think I figured it out okay. I felt like some of the concepts were just taking a really long time to click. One of the professors sent out some videos as additional resources and one of those ended up helping me, but it's also possible I was just more awake when I was working on the problems.