La Trobe University, Bendigo

Department of Information Technology

INT21/31[B]CN: Computer Networks

Assignment 3, 2005

Your task in this assignment is to investigate ONE ONLY of the following topics in computer network architecture, and submit a report/essay on your findings. Most of the questions are fairly "open-ended", so it'll be easy to do too much! Keep reminding yourself that you only have to write a maximum of 2000 words for the assignment. You must also remember to correctly reference your information sources!

Note also that additional topics might appear on this page as they are suggested to us. It could be worth checking back regularly if you don't like any of those given below.

• Investigate the LEAP proposal for replacing/augmenting current Internet application protocols. In particular, you should explain what LEAP is, what are its intended areas of applicability, and how it works. It will also be worthwhile discussing what its "competitor" protocols are, and the likelihood of its widespread adoption.

• Investigate peering between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Australia. You should discuss, in somewhat more detail than was covered in the lectures, what peering is, why ISPs peer with other their commercial competitors, and who are the main players in Australian peering. Discussion of the commercial aspects of peering is also appropriate for this question -- what an ISP pays, to whom, and what they get for their money. How is peering relevant to your (business or domestic) choice of ISP?

• SMTP Greylisting is a technique recently developed to help combat the spam problem. You should discuss the greylisting process, detail how it works and identify if it breaks or conforms to the SMTP standards as set out in the relevant IETF's RFCs.

• Large corporate server farms use Load Balancing technologies in order to allow service requests (namely HTTP, HTTPS and SMTP) to be spread across numerous servers. Without it, a single server would have to cope with the entire load and in many situations (eg. Google) it would melt very quickly. There are three primary forms of load balancing -- you are to identify each of these and briefly detail how each of these function and what configuration or software changes are required in order to implement them.

• Investigate the use of PGP (and/or GnuPG) as a practical encryption tool, suitable for everyday use in the modern email environment. Download a recent package and install as a plug-in in your normal/usual email software. Document the effort required to create a key pair, distribute your public key, and exchange encrypted and/or signed emails with others. It's obvious that you'll have to work with someone else to manage this, unless you have two different email addresses of your own. Shared assignments are possible, but you each must use (at an absolute minimum) a different email package, and submit separate assignment reports. If you're intending to submit your assignment by email, I would like it signed with your private key and a copy of your public key handed to me as well so I can verify its source.

• The best (free) SNMP package for Unix is widely believed to be tkined, as discussed in the lectures. There are many other SNMP-based network monitoring packages in existence, particularly for Windows systems, although there are a few for Macs as well. Discover one (or more) such packages (such as Big Sister or Nagios), install it on your home system(s) and configure it to monitor a suitable portion of the network.

• Describe briefly the application protocols that are involved in the (very fashionable) new network application of podcasting. You do not have to describe how to get podcasting working on your system, but you do have to explain (briefly) how the enabling application protocol(s) work.

• Investigate layer-4 switching and its relationship to transparent Web proxies. You probably should not tackle this question unless you are quite familiar with the workings of TCP.

Students are reminded of the University's policy on plagiarism. This will be applied in this and all other assignments in Computer Networks.

This assignment carries 20% of your mark for Computer Networks.

Due Date:3rd June, 2005 (end of semester 1)

Lecturer: Phil Scott, 5444 7277, p.scott@latrobe.edu.au.