Mark's IT Blog

Data communications week 8 brought a focus on wireless communications.

In the tutorial we worked with some wireless network sniffers to get a deeper understanding of wireless networking. As I was running ubunutu on my laptop I was unable to use the software prescribed (http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider) which is a replacement for NetStumbler.

Instead I had to use Kismet which is an Ubuntu option that was not very user friendly as it ran in the terminal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_(software).

Week 8 of grid computing encompassed a completion the previous lecture on Grid Resource management (specifically distributed resource management [DRM]). The week 8 lecture was then a detailed introduction to sensor grid networks which I imagine is one of the most likely futures for grid computing.

In sensor network Data filtering and security were the main issues discussed.

Internet Application Development’s eighth week began discussion on data stores. The topics covered included:

• Introduction to data stores
• DataSource Controls
• User Interaction with data sources

Some common data stores include:

• RDBMS (SQL server, Oracle, MySQL etc)
• XML
• Access 🙁

Case study’s week 8 lecture looked at documentation. This feature has been recognized as a critical factor for IS success and as a major separator between professional and amateur work.

Some key documentation includes:

• User Manuals (End User, Staff, Administrator)
• Installation Guide
• Integration Guide
• Troubleshooting Procedures
• Operational Procedures
• Test Plan + Test Results

For complex Information system completing all of the above documents in full detail would be very costly and time consuming which is a major reason why documentation is rarely complete.

For our Web Application we are required to complete the documents with a lite version test plan.

Another missed lecture and tutorial for Data Communications which I definitely regret as the subject is very interesting.

Week 7 focused on Local Area Networks, the reasons for them, how they work and how to implement them.

I am still struggling to follow the lecture material in Grid Computing, but none-the-less learning a lot and finding my feet in the more practical tutorials.

Week 7’s lecture discussed:

• Grid Resources
• Resource Specification
• Grid Processing
• Grid Application Hosting

Internet application development continued the style matching lecture material to assignment requirements. This seems like a very effective way to make the knowledge stick.

The topics this week were:

• Validation Controls
• Master Pages
• Themes and Skins
• Navigation Controls

All of these were required on our assignment which ensured we revised it in detail.

After working with ASP.NET I was really impressed and wondered how many large companies used it. The chart above is the web server market share for Fortune 1000 companies from mid 2007.

Case studies seventh week was a tough one. A large group submission was due which took a lot of time and planning, however the end product was not of a very good standard.

Although this can be frustrating it is worth analyzing why we, as a group failed to return a high quality submission. I have identified some of the factors that played against us:

Team Management factors:

• Lack of motivation – At each stage of the assignment we all lacked motivation (some more than others). In ‘real-life’ environments there is generally either a financial motivator or ethics (in the case of volunteers).
• Lack of a common goal – Not all of our team has the same goal for the subject, so whilst a team member may be achieving their goals the group may fall short of other members’ goals.
• Lack of defined consequences –  If a team member failed to perform, there was not defined consequence. This is something we should have defined clearly.

Individual factors:

• Ability and Knowledge – Most companies have a minimum of 5 weeks training plus 3 month probation for any complex jobs. I can now understand the value of ensuring team members possess the tools they need to do a job. Relying on team members to ‘pick it up as they go’ can work out well but is very risky.
• Clear communication – If something is not going well it is the responsibility of the team leader to identify this and amend it. Staying calm and positive may not be the best way to communicate impending disaster.

There is a lot more to team dynamics than this but these are some small points that I took out of the last task.

Data Communications sixth week was a follow up on the assignment topics:

• TCP/IP
• ARP
• DHCP
• more wireshark analysis

The lecture was an audio recording which gave us a very nice overview of routing.

Three major types of routing:

• Centralized routing
• Static Decentralized routing
• Dynamic Decentralized routing (adaptive routing)

Al three are used through the internet.

The recording followed some example of HTTP requests travelling through a network.

Grid computing’s 6th week provided a look into clusters, specifically:

• Clusters vs Grids
• Benchmarking techniques
• Cluster and Grid programming environments

Discussion of a cluster implementation method, Beowulf described how some clusters differ. A key characteristic of clusters is their interconnect technologies, some of the options are:

• Fast Ethernet
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• Myrianet
• Infiniband

For a detailed list and comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths#Local_area_networks

It is also worth noting that latency can become more important than bandwidth is many cluster networks. This would be dependent on the programs running on the cluster.