Dear Students,

As the Data Network final exam on the 2nd of August approaches, here are important details to keep in mind:
- Register for the DN course final exam on both LSF and CMS before 26th of July.
- Only students who successfully passed the midterm (or midterm retake) exam are eligible for the final exam.
- We will inform you about your assigned exam room in the week of the exam.
- Remember to bring your student ID and an official ID document (ID card, passport, driver license, ...) on the exam day.
- You can enter the room at 9:00 AM; the exam starts at 09:15 AM and lasts for more than 120 minutes. The exact time will be determined as we are getting closer to the exam.
- You are allowed to bring and use one A4-sized note sheet for the exam that is signed with your name and signature. You can use both sides as you like and do whatever you want. Paint pictures of flowers on both sides, print in font size 3, and write with finger-paint….use it. Of course, nothing digital! Just paper!

If you cannot register to LSF as an Erasmus student or for any other reason, please email us at inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de with your name, matriculation number, and the reason as soon as possible.
 
Good luck with your preparations!
Your DN team

Dear Students,

Next week (23/07) 2pm CEST for the Data Network lecture you will have the unique opportunity to hear how the Internet is made from three guest speakers Sander Steffann (RIPE NCC), Jan Zorz (6connect), and Gabriella Schittek (ICANN). They will first present how Internet governance works in practice, and will then be available for questions. This is a unique opportunity to learn more about the (social) infrastructure that makes the Internet tick!

The Lecture will be online (Zoom link https://eu02web.zoom.us/j/69446583039 password 186398) and we highly recommend attending this lecture considering the importance of the topic.

 

Bio:

Sander Steffann is an Internet specialist from The Netherlands. He started a small ISP in his home town in 1995, the same year he began studying computer science at the University of Twente. Since 2010 he is a self employed consultant. He has been involved in all aspects of the Internet. On the technical side he has done sysadmin, routing, security, DNS, web hosting, email, software development etc etc. From architecture and design down to hands on deployment and debugging the underlying code (you had to in 1995…). On the non-technical side he has been one of the chairs of the RIPE Address Policy Working Group for 11 years, a member of the RIPE NCC Arbiters Panel, a member of the NRO NC/ASO AC, a founding board member of The Netherlands IPv6 Foundation, a founding board member of the NLNOG Foundation and a founding board member of the Global NOG Alliance. He is currently an Executive Board member of the RIPE NCC.

Jan Zorz is VP of 6connect Labs; Global NOG Alliance (GNA) co-founder and board member; SINOG chairman; SEE10 PC chairman; RIPE PC vice-chair; IPv6 consultant and long time promotor

Gabriella Schittek joined ICANN in January 2007, having previously worked for the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) and the .uk registry Nominet. In her first role at ICANN, she managed the Secretariat of the country code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) for several years.
In her current role as Stakeholder Engagement Director, Nordic & Central Europe, Gabriella is responsible for supporting the organization’s engagement in the region with all ICANN stakeholders, including governments, private sector, civil society, technical community and academia, including through direct contacts, awareness raising and capacity building initiatives.

--
With best regards,
DN Team

Dear Students,

 

Below you will find some important details regarding your Data Networks Midterm Retake Exam:

 

Please bring your student ID and an official ID document (ID card, passport, driver license, ...) to the midterm retake. We will control these documents.

 

Midterm Retake Exam Date: 

 - Friday, June 7, 9:00 CEST.

Midterm Retake Exam Venue: 

  We will be using only one room Lecture Hall 02 Building E1 3. 

 

Seat assignments:

 You will find your assigned seat according to the list posted on the doors of the lecture room. 

 On your seat, you will find your personalized exam. Therefore, do not use any other seat. If you are unsure, please contact a tutor outside the hall before you enter the hall or in the hall afterward. 

 

We follow a strict no-tolerance policy for cheating and plagiarism. If we find academic misconduct, you will receive 0 points for this exam.

 

Best regards,

You DN Team

Dear Students,

 

Registration for the Midterm Retake Exam is open - (remember the exam will happen Friday, 7th of June, 9:00 CEST).

 

The registration is only for students who registered for the Midterm Exam that 

• (i) failed 
• (ii) could not participate due to medical reasons and have a medical certificate can participate in the midterm retake.

 

Please make sure that you send the medical certificate to the data network email address.

 

We would like to remind you that the exam will take place in-person, where we will provide printed versions of the exam for everyone.

 

 Instructions:

 - Read carefully all the information on the introduction sheet.

 - Make sure that you fill in identification information correctly (Name, student ID)

 - You will have 90 minutes at your disposal to solve the exam

 - You are allowed to bring sheet(s) of paper and/or a single notebook (laptop) to the Midterm retake exam for a quick look at the lectures material (slides, self-made notes).

 - However, please note for the whole duration of the exam, you are not allowed: 

1. Any access to the Internet AND
2. Access to other smaller smart devices (such as Smartphones, Tablets, etc)

  

Good luck,

DN Team

Dear students,

we hope that the mid-term exam overall went well. To get a better understanding of what the exam was like for you, and what you think about the course in general, we prepared a survey:

https://nextcloud.init.mpg.de/index.php/apps/forms/mykkszdGBTRYcWfd

Please fill out the survey to help us make Data Networks more awesome!

With best regards,

The DN'24 Team

Dear Students,

Below you will find some important details regarding your Data Networks Midterm exam:

Midterm Exam Date: 
  - Friday, 24th of May, 14:00 CEST. 

Midterm Exam Venue: 
   We will be using three different rooms. You are assigned to one of the rooms based on your matriculation number: 

    * Günter-Hotz Lecture Hall Building (E2.2): Numbers: 2522000 to 7058299 (inclusive) 
    * Lecture Hall 02 Building E1 3:                     Numbers: 7058300 to 7062418 (inclusive) 
    * Lecture Hall 03 Building E1 3:                     Numbers: 7062419 to 7090000 (inclusive)

Seat assignments:
  You will find your assigned seat according to the list posted on the doors of the lecture rooms. 
  On your seat you will find your personalized assignment. Therefore, do not use any other seat. If you are unsure, please contact a tutor outside the hall before you enter the hall or in the hall afterwards. 
  
Best regards,
You DN Team

Dear Students,

The Midterm Exam is getting closer - Friday, 24th of May, 14:00 CEST.

As a student, you must register in CMS to be able to take the exam by Wednesday (22nd of May).

We would like to remind you that the exam will take place in-person, where we will provide printed versions of the exam for everyone.

Instructions:
- Read carefully all the information on the introduction sheet.
- Make sure that you fill in identification information correctly (Name, student ID)
- You will have 90 minutes at your disposal to solve the exam
- We will have a feedback survey after the exam, where you can also let us know whether this worked out for you!
- You are allowed to bring sheet(s) of paper and/or a single notebook (laptop) to the Midterm exam for a quick look at the lectures material (slides, self-made notes).
- However, please note for the whole duration of the exam, you are not allowed: 

1. Any access to the Internet AND
2. Access to other smaller smart devices (such as Smartphones, Tablets, etc)

  
Good luck,
DN Team

Dear Students,

some of you may already have noticed that I released a small challenge for additional fun with packets in the forum:

https://inet-teaching.mpi-inf.mpg.de/dn2024/forum/viewtopic.php?p=76

If you like (packet related) riddles, this might be fun. :-)

Also, I just released another hint, as so far, no correct solution has been submitted!

Good luck, and have fun!

 

With best regards,

Tobias

Dear Students,

as previously announced, I will stream a little 'doing things in practice'-session today. I already joined the BBB room, and will start the session at 12:15.

You can join the session here:

https://bbb.mpi-klsb.mpg.de/b/tob-lni-jxl-hxx

The session will be recorded. In addition, it would be nice if--during the session--you could collaborate in the 'Shared Notes' feature of the BBB room to create notes/documentation for the session.

With best regards,

Tobias

Dear Students,

the results of the poll are in; Most students seem to be available next Wednesday, May 1st 12:00.

I will be in this BBB room from 12:00 on-wards, planning to actually start CT (as usual):

https://bbb.mpi-klsb.mpg.de/b/tob-lni-jxl-hxx

The session will be recorded. In addition, it would be nice if--during the session--you could collaborate in the 'Shared Notes' feature of the BBB room to create notes/documentation for the session.

What will be good to be a bit familiar with before jumping into the session:

• Have memorized how to use vi: https://cets.seas.upenn.edu/answers/vi.html
  • Note: We will be using vi (not vim) here, which can be a bit more difficult to handle
  • You can play around with a vim here: https://www.vimonlineeditor.com/
• Took a look how the filesystem tends to be organized on linux/unix systems
  • Good summary here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/classic-sysadmin-the-linux-filesystem-explained

The Agenda will be:

• Setting up virtual box on a Windows 10 notebook
  • We will be using Windows 10 because that is the only non-linux notebook I have around
  • This should, technically, also work on Windows 11
  • If you are using Linux, I am somewhat assuming that you kind of know what you are doing and don't need help setting up a virtualization solution
  • If you are wondering why we are not using Hyper-V, I am somewhat assuming that you kind of know what you are doing and don't need help setting up a virtualization solution
  • Important: If you want to click along on your notebook, note that this will likely not work that well on a Notebook with 8gb of Memory; And if it does, it won't be fun.
• Setting up a Debian 12 VM to work as a 'Switch' and packet sniffer
  • It is easier to setup something 'more slim' with Debian than with Ubuntu; And we will still be busy getting a lot of funny auto-daemons uninstalled.
  • We will still have to install a GUI so we can run Wireshark on this host to look at packets
• Setting up OpenBSD VMs to run routing daemons and other things
  • OpenBSD has a tendency of being _really_ slim; Does not come with a lot of convenience tools, but has a ton of routing daemons pre-installed you will learn about in the lecture
  • Also, the man pages are kind of great. ;-)
  • Just does things _very_ bare-bone; So you can really see what we are talking about in the course.
• Connecting all of it together; And maybe adding another switch
  • We'll see how far we can get with this; Maybe we can go over a bit more than just sending packets
  • If we end up having a lot of time, we may even setup a VM with a browser to see what is happening there. ;-)

Please let me know which questions you have prior to the session (email tfiebig@mpi-inf.mpg.de for that). Otherwise, I will see you on Wednesday.

(And if I, for some reason, forget being in the room on time, please start sending a continuous stream of emails my way. ;-))

 

With best regards,

Tobias

Moin,

as there was some interest in doing a session where we get ourselves a little lab setup on our notebook to try out many things from DataNetworks in practice, I made a dud(le) to figure out the best time in the coming weeks for such an (online) session; Please vote. :-)

 

https://dud-poll.inf.tu-dresden.de/dn2024-doing-things/

 

With best regards,

Tobias

Dear Students,

we received various feedback around our decision to not record or stream the lectures this year. We would like to share our reasoning behind that decision, hoping that this will give you some reassurance that you are not missing out on content.

"Lecture Recordings" in the previous year were done with a notebook with a webcam plus an additional bluetooth headset worn by the lecturer. This did not necessarily created 'good' recordings. Furthermore, lectures often span multiple topics, making it difficult to have 'one video, one topic'. At the same time, creating the recording often interrupted the lecture.

At the same time, we do have the videos we made in 2020, when we all felt the sudden need to not be on campus. These are one-video one-topic, and have been recorded with proper recording equipment.

The content changes we implemented for this year focus on the order of topics, while the core-content stays the same, i.e., these video just have to be watched in a different order, while being of significantly better quality.

Finally, given that when it came to dealing with lecture recordings myself, I tended to be a person who spent far too much time downloading lecture recordings, promised themselves to really watch them this time, and then instead decided to do a spontaneous "Is it possible to watch a whole show with 7 seasons in 24h"-thing instead:

Many of the topics in the lecture have an equally practical part as the theoretical part we focus on in this course (given that this is a university course). What I always found much more effective is actually setting these things up (usually: repeatedly), and playing with them in practice (incidentally often while being five seasons into some show).

If there is enough interest for an introduction to setting things up, I'd be happy to stream a session on how to get some virtual machines going on, e.g., your notebook to do just that.

Please use the forum to start a thread on that, if there actually is some widespread interest in such a session, which we can then use to coordinate a date for it.

 

With best regards,

Tobias

 

Dear Students,

Due to the existing overlap between the Hands-On-Networking course and our course, there are the following regulations with regard to taking both courses:

1. You are _not_ allowed to use both courses as an (compulsory choice) lecture / (Wahlpflicht) Vorlesung. 
2. You are allowed to use Data Networks as an (compulsory-choice) lecture / (Wahlpflicht) Vorlesung while using Hand-on Networking as either a seminar, practical course / Praktika, or as a free-choice module. If you do so, you can get the full 15 Credit Points / ECTS Points for taking both courses.

In case you have any questions, do not hesitate to write us an email to inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de.

Dear Students,

in contrast to last year's Data Networks iteration, we will no longer offer a hybrid model.

To pass the lecture you will have to

• pass the midterm
• pass the final exam.

(To be admitted to the final exam you must pass the midterm!)

The first lecture (also includes organizational matters) starts on April 16th.