I managed to get myself so stressed about falling behind over the last few weeks that I don’t think I truly absorbed any of the information presented or any sense of purpose in the tasks I’ve completed. So I’ve taken a few days off, re-read the course details, identified where I think I’ve been hasty, promised myself not to write silly things on the discussion board, and pretty much started again.
The notes on how to control and use study time posted by other students have been invaluable. I’m starting to feel like I’m in control again! So, another try...
Five tips for Top Bloggers
Ahem… yes, the very first task and I somehow managed to miss it. I was wondering why I kept seeing it on everyone elses blogs!
1 – Design
I’ve seen so many blogs, particularly the myspace type, that are practically impossible to read due to a clash, or often likeness, between the background image and the text. Please, if you want it to be read, make sure we can see the text and navigate the page easily!
2 – Audience
I’m starting to wonder if I’m a bit old fashioned. I admit that I insist on spelling out words in full and using proper punctuation on text messages from my mobile phone, and I’m the same when I’m communicating online. I think you should write for your audience. It’s fine to pad out the text in your blog with quotes like this one, from the lovely Jodie’s blog
The notes on how to control and use study time posted by other students have been invaluable. I’m starting to feel like I’m in control again! So, another try...
Five tips for Top Bloggers
Ahem… yes, the very first task and I somehow managed to miss it. I was wondering why I kept seeing it on everyone elses blogs!
1 – Design
I’ve seen so many blogs, particularly the myspace type, that are practically impossible to read due to a clash, or often likeness, between the background image and the text. Please, if you want it to be read, make sure we can see the text and navigate the page easily!
2 – Audience
I’m starting to wonder if I’m a bit old fashioned. I admit that I insist on spelling out words in full and using proper punctuation on text messages from my mobile phone, and I’m the same when I’m communicating online. I think you should write for your audience. It’s fine to pad out the text in your blog with quotes like this one, from the lovely Jodie’s blog
“Noway ppl r mad nowdyz!lol...well f i dnt spek 2 u b4 u go av gd holidy n ill cya wen u gt bk”
if you are just talking to your friends, but don’t expect your granny to understand it. Choose your words for your audience!
3 – Think
Think before pressing publish. Do you really want that rant about how badly you boss / parents / friends treat you to stay out there forever? Sure, attitudes change over time, but a written slander available to all the world can have lingering after effects.
4 – Play
Try out all the functions of your blog – if you don’t like an element delete it. Blogging sites such as www.bravenet.com have a wealth of options available to truly personalise your site, don’t overdo it and end up in the perils of tip 1 though!
5 – Enjoy!
There are people who use their blogs to dispense their misery to the web community, but blogs are a tool that can be used for much better purpose. Use it to keep in touch with family and friends, unite people with similar interests, share your opinions of the world.
Telnet
I thought I would start with something that really freaked me out and made me feel entirely ridiculous the first time I tried. This time I went straight to Hyperterminal, typed in the address, dialled directly through, located the author and the books in seconds – painless, stressfree seconds! We don’t have a printer set up on this pc and it is defaulting to offer fax instead of print, which seems to explain the reason I couldn’t get a print/email option. As a result I’m not going to be able to complete this task as requested, but at least this time I’ve got my head around why!
I was asked if I was using a VT100 or an NCSA VT100 terminal when I dialled Curtin, I took a guess and went for VT100. It worked luckily! I tried to do some further research about VT100 and found that it is a terminal emulator, but it got a bit too complex, and I’ve got a lot of work to do today – I’ll come back to it later.
A bit more reading done and now I understand that telnet can be a very useful tool for accessing libraries, but I think it is widely a forgotten application that users who have adapted to the current bright, highly graphic internet applications would struggle to adapt to.
Traceroute & Ping tasks
After completing this the first time I wrote in this blog that I thought I understood the concepts of what I had just done. I didn’t. Not by a long shot. Last week I was working near the citrix server team at work when screams of alarm rang out – they were pinging one of the bank’s servers and it wasn’t replying. After they had resolved the incident I spoke to them and got the story of traceroute and pinging in very layman terms, and I think I can now safely say – I understand! How they explained it to me…
When you ping a server (or destination computer), you’re actually saying “hello server, are you there?”, and the server responds (hopefully) with “yes, I’m here”. That’s pinging. They use it a lot in our bank where they have zillions of servers, many of whom are hidden way in parts of the country you will never find them (quite deliberately), but with all their interconnectivity they require constant love and care. An easy way to quickly check a server is to ping it, if it answers, things are looking good.
The technical description is that you send a packet or packets of information to the destination computer, and that it replies or sends an ‘echo’.
Traceroute tells you how your message (ie packet) gets to the computer/server. We ran a traceroute to a server in the bank and then went and physically saw the servers in the first few hops. The server itself was about 100km away, but we matched the server descriptions from the traceroute to the servers in the datarooms and I got to see the very real side of the traceroute idea.
So, to summarise, pinging is the phone call to check if things are ok, traceroute is the map to get there.
In my haste I hadn’t completed the initial exercises properly, so here they are completed correctly.
Traceroute task
I used the traceroute programme from www.network-tools.com to find the curtin.edu.au site. It took 19 hops and 291 milliseconds to locate to the server.
if you are just talking to your friends, but don’t expect your granny to understand it. Choose your words for your audience!
3 – Think
Think before pressing publish. Do you really want that rant about how badly you boss / parents / friends treat you to stay out there forever? Sure, attitudes change over time, but a written slander available to all the world can have lingering after effects.
4 – Play
Try out all the functions of your blog – if you don’t like an element delete it. Blogging sites such as www.bravenet.com have a wealth of options available to truly personalise your site, don’t overdo it and end up in the perils of tip 1 though!
5 – Enjoy!
There are people who use their blogs to dispense their misery to the web community, but blogs are a tool that can be used for much better purpose. Use it to keep in touch with family and friends, unite people with similar interests, share your opinions of the world.
Telnet
I thought I would start with something that really freaked me out and made me feel entirely ridiculous the first time I tried. This time I went straight to Hyperterminal, typed in the address, dialled directly through, located the author and the books in seconds – painless, stressfree seconds! We don’t have a printer set up on this pc and it is defaulting to offer fax instead of print, which seems to explain the reason I couldn’t get a print/email option. As a result I’m not going to be able to complete this task as requested, but at least this time I’ve got my head around why!
I was asked if I was using a VT100 or an NCSA VT100 terminal when I dialled Curtin, I took a guess and went for VT100. It worked luckily! I tried to do some further research about VT100 and found that it is a terminal emulator, but it got a bit too complex, and I’ve got a lot of work to do today – I’ll come back to it later.
A bit more reading done and now I understand that telnet can be a very useful tool for accessing libraries, but I think it is widely a forgotten application that users who have adapted to the current bright, highly graphic internet applications would struggle to adapt to.
Traceroute & Ping tasks
After completing this the first time I wrote in this blog that I thought I understood the concepts of what I had just done. I didn’t. Not by a long shot. Last week I was working near the citrix server team at work when screams of alarm rang out – they were pinging one of the bank’s servers and it wasn’t replying. After they had resolved the incident I spoke to them and got the story of traceroute and pinging in very layman terms, and I think I can now safely say – I understand! How they explained it to me…
When you ping a server (or destination computer), you’re actually saying “hello server, are you there?”, and the server responds (hopefully) with “yes, I’m here”. That’s pinging. They use it a lot in our bank where they have zillions of servers, many of whom are hidden way in parts of the country you will never find them (quite deliberately), but with all their interconnectivity they require constant love and care. An easy way to quickly check a server is to ping it, if it answers, things are looking good.
The technical description is that you send a packet or packets of information to the destination computer, and that it replies or sends an ‘echo’.
Traceroute tells you how your message (ie packet) gets to the computer/server. We ran a traceroute to a server in the bank and then went and physically saw the servers in the first few hops. The server itself was about 100km away, but we matched the server descriptions from the traceroute to the servers in the datarooms and I got to see the very real side of the traceroute idea.
So, to summarise, pinging is the phone call to check if things are ok, traceroute is the map to get there.
In my haste I hadn’t completed the initial exercises properly, so here they are completed correctly.
Traceroute task
I used the traceroute programme from www.network-tools.com to find the curtin.edu.au site. It took 19 hops and 291 milliseconds to locate to the server.
The IP address of curtin.edu.au is 134.7.179.53
Ping task
I used the www.network-tools.com site to ping the webct site, the average response time over 10 pings was 271.3ms.
Next I used the A-toolbar software downloaded from www.tucows.com . This site gave an average response time over 5 pings instead of 10, with the result of 293ms.
Then I realised I could change the numbers of pings to 10, and ran it again. This time the average response time was 311ms.
Then I decided to try the www.Centralops.net ping, and found that they gave me more information than the previous software had.
This one was really good, it told me how many packets were sent, how many were returned, the fastest and slowest response times and the average, which worked out to be 251ms.
I conclude that the different response times experienced depend on a numer of factors including how many packets of information are being sent, and their size, and where the site is based, and how many servers you need to go through to get there.
Traceroute further task
I ran a further traceroute from www.network-tools.com to the Curtin site, the result was identical to the first test, there was no change in the hops, servers or time. This figure is very likely change given the so many thousands of optional routes that could be taken to the destination site, it just so happens that not much has changed between networks-tools and Curtin in the last 40 minutes!
And that’s the end of my module 1 recap. It was so much easier the second time around, and so much more enjoyable!
1 comment:
Hi Cherna, I think you haave done well on your re-cap - it appears to be very comprehensive. Cheers
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