CSC 469 Favorites

Our textbook

The publisher's site for Kurose & Ross is at: www.awl.com/kurose-ross

There are some fun applets with which to play: wps.aw.com/aw_kurose_network_3/0,9212,1406348-content,00.html

You can use your access code from the first page of our textbook to get other goodies... and there are a lot of them:

•  Programming assignment and Ethereal help
•  A long list of the authors' favorite web sites
•  Self-assessment quizzes, etc.

Here are some tasty links, by chapter/section.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Section 1.1 Introduction

•  www.isc.org - The Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. keeps track of things like how fast the Internet is growing as shown in this web page: www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet - Wikipedia summary of the Internet... some nice history stuff here.
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web - Wikipedia summary of the WWW
•  www-net.cs.umass.edu/personnel/kurose.html - our textbook author's school web page at UMass
•  www.rfc-editor.org/ - stores the "Request For Comment" (RFC) documents that you'll see liberally strewn throughout our textbook.

Section 1.2 The Network Edge

•  news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1264205.stm - a bogus end system... an Internet toaster

Section 1.3 The Network Core

Section 1.4 Access Networks

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem - Wikipedia summary of cable modems
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dsl - Wikipedia summary of DSL
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL - and ADSL

Section 1.5 ISP's and Internet Backbones

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network - Wikipedia's take on Tier 1 networks (9 of them)... there are links to Tier 2 and 3 in there

Section 1.6 Delay

•  www.traceroute.org - a gaggle of servers running traceroute for your (and my) enjoyment
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute - speaking of traceroute, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it
•  www.mapulator.com/ - this is so cool... the site runs a traceroute and then uses Google map technology to show where your Internet packets went physically. It's the intersection of the "real world" and the "virtual world" of the Internet
•  www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/tracert.mspx?mfr=true - this is the man page (help) for the tracert program that implements traceroute for Windows machines.
•  www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/tcpip_utils.mspx?mfr=true - Ya know, let me just post this as well... it's an index of many network-related programs available on Windows machines.

 Section 1.7 Protocol layers

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite - Wikipedia summary of the layers of the Internet Protocol stack.. there are some nice pictures and alternate explanations (from our text) here

 Section 1.8 History

•  www.w3.org/History.html - WWW Consortium history blurb
•  www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html - Tim Berners-Lee page with screen shots of his first web browser attempt.

Chapter 2 Application Layer

 Section 2.1 Application Layer

•  www.accesswhois.com/search/ - is a convenient whois web site, actually discussed on page 174 in the homework problems for Chapter 2.
•  www.pingplotter.com/ - a fancy ping, huh? Actually, I've used it. It works. And, it's pretty fun.
•  www.iana.org/ - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority... they have a list of the popular TCP numbers and supposedly throw an awesome Christmas party.

 Section 2.2 HTTP

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http - Wikipedia summary of HTTP
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url - Wikipedia summary of URLs
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie - Wikipedia summary of HTTP cookies
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet = Wikipedia summary of telnet

 Section 2.4 Email

•  www.hotmail.com was the first popular web-based email provider... of course, everyone uses www.gmail.com now, right (or www.gamil.com if you mistype)
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smtp - Wikipedia summary of SMTP, the email protocol

 Section 2.5 DNS

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dns - Wikipedia summary of DNS
•  www.root-servers.org/ - list of the root DNS servers
•  www.internic.net/ - Internic domain registration site... try their whois and FAQ isn't bad either
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nslookup - Wikipedia summary of nslookup
•  www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php - a web wrapper around nslookup... it's the first one listed when I googled "nslookup"
•  www.dnsstuff.com/ - a zillion tools like ping, nslookup, whois, traceroute, etc. available from web pages

 Section 2.6 P2P

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer - Wikipedia summary of P2P
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster - Wikipedia summary of Napster
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella - Wikipedia summary of Gnutella
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaZaA - Wikipedia summary of Kazaa
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent - Wikipedia summary of BitTorrent, which may now be a more popular P2P option than anything in our textbook... it's used a lot to download software
•  www.bcr.com/opinion/next_generation_networks/peer-to-peer_traffic_internet_myth_born_20051101647.htm - an interesting Nov 2005 report disputing the claims of P2P bandwidth usage
•  www.internettrafficreport.com/ - a unique little Internet traffic report site... I couldn't find the breakdown by application type that I wanted, however.

Chapter 3 Transport Layer

 Section 3.1 Transport layer

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_layer - Wikipedia summary of the transport layer
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers  - Wikipedia's list of well-known TCP/UDP ports

 Section 3.2 Mux/Demux'ing

•  www.asic-world.com/digital/combo4.html - many descriptions of muxes in the world of combinational logic (ala CSC 220, if you've had it)... I don't know if this will help you understand mux'ing in the transport layer or not.
•  www.iana.org/ - The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority site... click on "Most Popular Links" to find a (long) list of assigned port numbers.

 Section 3.3 UDP

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol - Wikipedia summary of UDP

Chapter 4 Network Layer

Section 4.1 Intro

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_layer - Wiki summary of the network layer... an ok starting point.

Section 4.3 Routers

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router - Wiki summary of routers... a little history, but not a real strong page

Section 4.4 IP

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4 - Wiki summary of IP, version 4... nice header explanation
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 - Wiki summary of IP, version 6

Section 4.5 Routing algorithms

•  www-b2.is.tokushima-u.ac.jp/~ikeda/suuri/dijkstra/Dijkstra.shtml - a fun, fun applet showing off Dijkstra's algorithm
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra's_algorithm - Wiki summary of Dijkstra's algorithm
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_state_protocol - Wiki summary of link-state routing
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-vector_routing_protocol - Wiki summary of distance vector routing

Section 4.6 Internet Routing

•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Routing_Information_Protocol - Wiki summary of Routing Information Protocol (RIP)
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Shortest_Path_First - Wiki summary of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing
•  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bgp - Wiki summary of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

Chapter 5 Link Layer

Section 5.2 Error detection and correction

•  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check - Wiki summary of CRC

Ethereal

We'll use the uber-cool packet sniffer Ethereal as part of some of our homeworks.

•  www.ethereal.com/ - Ethereal home page
•  www.ethereal.com/download.html - to download your own free copy of Ethereal
•  www.ethereal.com/faq.html - Ethereal FAQ's
•  www.ethereal.com/distribution/docs/user-guide-us.pdf - Ethereal User's Guide in nice PDF form

Java

The best is java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/ for the Java 5.0 API. The yummiest!

If you want to download Java for your home computer, start here: java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp ... the top-most link (it currently says "Get the JDK Download" is usually what you want. Java is already on all the lab computers.

You can (usually) improve your productivity by using an Intergrated Development Environment (IDE) when coding in Java. Most of our lab computers have two available: JGrasp and NetBeans. You have to click on "Start" and search.

Here are links to JGrasp, NetBeans and Eclipse (another really popular IDE):

•  www.jgrasp.org/ - JGrasp is my favorite because it's so tiny:
•  java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp - Many people like Sun's NetBeans, it offer more functionality at the expense of complexity and control... it can be downloaded with the Sun Java compiler/libraries at:
•  www.eclipse.org/ - Eclipse is really big, but really popular in industry:

Here's an open source Java textbook: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Programming

Other schools

Here's our networking course at other fine institutions of which you may have heard:

•  U of I's networking class is CS 438: www.cs.uiuc.edu/class/fa06/cs438/
•  At UIC it's CS 450: www.cs.uic.edu/~i450/
•  Northwestern University offers CS 340: www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ychen/classes/cs340-w06/

Etc

Here are some category-less links. Enjoy!

Ray Kurzweil is my favorite CS guy and author. "The Singularity is Near" is great, fun reading chock-full of research and crazy predictions and whatever: singularity.com/ ... click on Resources for some links to the latest technology news.

Acronyms abound... here's some help if you need it: www.acronymfinder.com/

thanks... yow, bill