McNair Program Assignments

Professor Jeanna Matthews: jnm@clarkson.edu
Department of Mathematics & Computer Science

Week 1 Assignments

  1. Read Chapter 4 of Computer Networking by Kurose and Ross
  2. Read the following lecture slides from CS454/CS554: Computer Communication
  3. Check out BGP Data Analysis
  4. Read James Lu's thesis and Kai-Wen Chung & San-Yiu Cheng's paper
  5. Learn the downloading basics: download, extract, parse data and put into database


Week 2 Assignments

  1. Start a list of query ideas on the web page
    • 3 different administrative matches (IP address and autonomous system have same owner)
    • Does source autonomous system always match first autonomous system in path?
    • Distribution of IP address block size (withdrawal and announcement)
    • Length of path
    • Alternate paths to destination autonomous system
    • Symmetry of paths
  2. Try ping and traceroute in Unix command prompt (tracert in command prompt in Windows)
  3. 6/6 - IP Fragmentation, ICMP, DHCP (ping and traceroute)
  4. 5/21 - Internet History
  5. Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
  6. Read End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet


Week 3 Assignments

  1. Learn the following Unix commands:
    • netstat
    • ssh versus telnet
  2. Use ethereal to trace your traceroutes:
    • su -c ethereal
  3. Search web for traceroute source code
  4. Read Internet Routing Instability


Week 4 Assignments

  1. Look at the traceroute source code (for Linux):
    • ftp://ftp.ee.lbl.gov/traceroute.tar.gz
    • download to /tmp
    • tar zxvf /tmp/traceroute.tar.gz
    • cd traceroute-1.4a12
    • ./configure
    • make (runs the make file)
    • su (need to be root to run traceroute)
    • ./traceroute www.clarkson.edu


Week 5 Assignments

  1. What is downloaded? Make a spreadsheet in Excel of the data
    • (i.e. what | # of files | raw size | imported? | imported size | # raw)
  2. What do we have that we are not using? List examples.
  3. Are there any other websites that we should be aware of for bgp data? What do we have already?
  4. Speed up import (i.e. indices, cache).
  5. Plan order of hard drives, etc.
  6. Read An Analysis of BGP Convergence Properties


Week 6 Assignments

  1. Work on McNair Program PowerPoint presentation
  2. Work on McNair Program paper


Week 7 Assignments

  1. Work on SURE PowerPoint presentation
  2. Work on McNair Program paper