La Trobe University, Bendigo
Department of Information Technology
INT21CN: Computer Networks
Assignment 3, 2002
Your task in this assignment is to investigate ONE ONLY
of the
following topics in computer network architecture, and submit a report
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.
Note also that additional topics might appear on this page as they
are suggested to me. It could be worth checking back regularly if you
don't like any of those given below.
- One of the biggest problems faced by Internet users is that of
Spam -- unsolicited commercial/bulk email. The
spammers use a great number of techniques to hide their identity,
but much can be discovered by a few simple tricks. Firstly, it
is usually possible to examine the
Received:
headers of a spam message and discover where it was
relayed -- you can then complain to the relay site's
administrator. Secondly, if the relay site doesn't respond
you can use a tool like traceroute
to
discover his "upstream ISP" and complain to
the admin of that site. Using some real spam email which has been
sent to you, discover and document:
- whether the relay or originating host can be identified, and
whether complaining to
postmaster
at that
site has any effect, and
- Whether upstream ISPs revealed by
traceroute
are
useful in the fight against spam, and finally
- How you can configure your mail software to filter spam coming
from known relay sites.
- A local Bendigo business desires a full-time Internet connection,
to enable them to run a Web and email server. You have been
engaged as a consultant to advise them on their options, and to
suggest the best mix of technology and products to serve their
purpose. You may assume that speed, whilst always obviously
important, is not their main concern. See if you can come up with
some "real-world numbers" for pricing, without doing an
excessive amount of work. This question is not>
about hardware and software. You are not to write about how
to set it up, what sort of computers would be required, what software
they should run, etc. Your assignment is to present options for the
"Basic Carriage Service" and the ISP costs, for a business which will,
presumably, be running a Web server and an email gateway on a
full-time connection. That's it. You must use Real World™
numbers, and there must be some comparative component. And yes, it
will be difficult to find this information
- Investigate steganography, and in particular how
it relates to encryption and the Internet. This is a fun topic,
because you should discover lots of interesting software and
applications. Try some of them, and document the results! One
absolutely fascinating aspect of this topic which has appeard in
recent months has been the use of "pattern analysis" to discover
whether a stego message exists in an object, by looking for the
characteristic "telltale" signs generated by common stego packages.
See if you can discover how this works. Your report should have
a reasonable practical component.
- 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 email software. Document the effort required to
create a key pair, distribute your public key, and exchange
encyrpted and/or signed emails with others. It's obvious that
you'll have to work with someone else to manage this. Shared
assignments are possible here, but I'd prefer if you each used
(at the least) a different email package, and submitted
separate assignment reports.
- Use
tkined
to build a network management system for
the Bendigo campus, monitoring most of the interesting pieces of
equipment in the campus network. You should submit the
".tki
" file for your system, along with a brief
description of what it does, and how it does it, so that we can run
it and check its operation. Obviously this question is only
relevant to people who are taking the subject on campus, although
if you're located somewhere with an interesting network perhaps you
could set up tkined
and use it there. Or perhaps you
could use one of the many other SNMP packages available, see below.
- Build a useful "Network Operations Console" using the freely
available
SNIPS
software which is installed on
our Unix systems. Extra information as for previous question.
- The best (free) SNMP package for Unix is
tkined
. 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 Netsaint), install them on your
home system(s) and report on their usefulness.
- Discover what the
pathchar
software package
does by installing it on your computer and testing it. Report briefly
on how it does its work, and your experience with it.
As mentioned in the introduction, you should expect to write no more
than 2000 words on the topic of
your choice, although this is not mandatory. You can submit your
assignment using either traditional hard copy (paper) form, or as an email attachment of MIME type
text/html
sent to
cnsubmit@ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au
, as for the previous
assignments. Your choice of submission format will not affect the mark
gained for your assignment. Submissions must, as usual, adhere to the
requirements of the La Trobe University, Bendigo Assignment Guide.
This assignment carries 20% of your mark for Computer Networks.
Due Date:7th June, 2002 (end of semester 1)
Lecturer: Phil Scott, 5444 7277,
p.scott@latrobe.edu.au.
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Copyright © 2002 by
Phil Scott,
La Trobe University.