CST 311 Week 8

Week 8

The material for this week is much smaller because it is due the same night that week 7 is supposed to complete. Because of this, it's also been a very rough final week with regard to assignments. The material assigned for this week covered the link layer and switches. This seems like a pretty straightforward topic after covering routers in the previous week(s). The routers send data (datagrams) based on IP addresses and the switched send data (frames) based on MAC addresses. Switches are intended to be used within a network.

I'm really glad this course is coming to an end. I've enjoyed it in the sense that it has been challenging and I feel I've learned a lot, but I'm exhausted and it's been very difficult to maintain my study discipline. There are three days until the final exam. I have spent the past seven weeks studying consistently in my free time. I'll likely relax a little and do some light review each night leading up to it. Because this is not a subject I'm already familiar with, I'm less focused on my grade for this course and have been more focused on actually understanding the material. I know it'll be useful in my career (it already has been a bit!).

CST 311 Week 7

Week 7

This week has been very difficult because it's a full week of material and we also have to do slightly more than half of week of material ("week 8") during the same week. Both weeks opened at the same time and close at the same time. I wasn't too worried about it until I got to homework #10, which was to come up with the routing table for a particular node in a network using the distance vector algorithm. I wanted to make sure I completely understood it (it took a lot of videos and reviewing the textbook). The textbook wasn't very helpful for the distance vector algorithm. It does a good job of explaining what's happening in the network, but doesn't use accurate mathematical syntax and has a some very confusing pseudocode to explain the algorithm. The videos were helpful, but weren't very precise on the steps needed to complete the second iteration of the algorithm. The topic Dijkstra's algorithm was much easier to follow (and was assigned in homework #9). This was the first half of the week that covered the rest of the Network layer.

The second half of the week began covering the link layer. There were a couple of longer videos on this topic. They covered parity errors and MAC protocols. The one on MAC protocols was long because there were a lot of protocols to cover. They're divided into separate kinds, which are channel partitioning, random access, and "taking turns" protocols.

The lab was focused on ICMP and traceroute, which I can't even remember if we have had this topic presented to us. These concepts are all completely new to me and trying to remember all of the details (and acronyms!) is very hard. It definitely worries me about the exam because the exam is worth 1/4 of our grade, I'm not a great test taker, and it's closed book. One more week of material left and I should have adequate time to relax a bit and review all of the topics covered for the final.