417 Announcements

Breaking news about the course

May 11
Reminder for those of you planning to take the 417 final exam: It takes place today from 8:00-10:00pm in our regular classroom (Hill-009). If you did not receive an A and are not planning on taking the final, please let me know (if you haven't already done so) so that I can minimize the number of exams I need to print.
May 6
I put up a list of final exam topics. I also posted the final topics overview (6 per page) list that we went through this past Monday.
May 2
As of yesterday, you should have received your tentative final grade - the grade that you will get if you do not take your final exam. If you have not received this, please let me know.
April 29
Assignment 6 grades are posted.
April 29
Assignment 5 grades are posted. All of your grades except for assignment 6 are posted. If anything is missing, please let me know immediately.
April 28
Assignment 4 and Exam 3 grades are posted. The class average for exam 3 was 76. The standard deviation was 16.7. Grades ranged from a low of 24 to a high of 100.
April 25

I realized that I omitted a discussion of concurrency control in the study guide. It has now been added. I also enhanced the discussion of virtualization to distinguish native versus hosted virtual machines and binary translation versus paravirtualization.

I also expanded the lecture slides and study guide (two days ago) to add the formal term password authentication protocol for the common login, password authentication scheme and CHAP for the Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol. This is essentially the same challenge-response protocol we discussed in class.

April 25

I wrote up some notes on virtualization in case you want more depth than provided by the lecture slides. Also, I added some missing links to the lectures pages (the ones you get by clicking on topics from the syllubus or list of exam topics). These include concurrency control and protection & firewalls.

April 24

Exam 3 will take place on Monday, April 27. To help you prepare, check the Exam info link for a list of topics that you should know for this exam. You will also see a link to a study guide that provides an overview of everything we have covered to date. Finally, will also see links to old exams. They should give you a good idea of what to expect on this exam.

Note: I did not proofread the study guide yet and will notify you if I post additions or corrections.

April 18
Assignment 6 is posted. This is a short written assignment and is due on Wednesday in recitation.
April 16
I posted a more detailed writeup on fault tolerance. Please read this before Monday's lecture since I will assume that you will be familiar with these concepts.
April 8
For assignment 5, I've updated the airport-locations.txt file in places.zip to fix eight entries that were missing state names. Your code should not have to change to handle this file.
April 6
I posted updated lecture slides on Authentication (6pp), Smart cards/biometrics/captcha (6pp), and Steganography (6pp).
April 4
For assignment 5, a student points out that some of my distance calculations are incorrect. Even though we're using the same formula, some of the results are slightly different. I still didn't track down where the mistake is. I posted his results (which I believe are more correct than mine).
April 4
Grades for assignments 2 & 3 are posted. Most of you did very well on the programming assignments (80+). I posted comments comprising my feedback on some common annoyances I encountered. Please look it over to make sure your next submissions don't have these. Strive for a beautiful submission: the digital equivalent of a clear plastic binder.
March 27
I made some minor changes to the study guide. I added a couple of sentences on LAN multicast, removed a few redundant sentences on rotor machines (I was describing them twice), and highlighed triple-DES.
March 27
I've added a brief synopsis of distributed authentication via OpenID to the study guide. I also expanded my write-up on OpenID (it's still superficial but contains more detail).
March 27
I posted some questions and answers from last year's exam as well as selected questions and answers from older exams. Any material that we did not yet cover was left out. Get the 50 slide version or the 6-slides per page 9-page version.
March 26

Exam 2 will take place on Monday, March 30. To help you prepare, check the Exam info link. This link contains a list of topics that you should know for this exam. You will also see a link to a study guide that provides an overview of everything we have covered to date. Finally, will also see links to old exams. They should give you a good idea of what to expect on this exam.

I added a brief summary of OpenID to both the study guide and as a link off the syllabus notes.

I also added a concise writeup of distributed lookup services to the syllabus notes.
March 25
Today's recitation is canceled.
March 23
I've updated the following lecture slides:
March 19
Assignment 5 is posted. This is a short assignment using Java RMI. It's due on April 13 but I'm posting this extra early so you can decide how to best allocate your time.
March 13
Assignment 4 is posted. This is a short assignment using ONC RPC. If you're weak in C or have never used a makefile, please start early and ask me questions. I've tried to put an extensive amount of tutorial info to make this as painless as possible.
March 10
I put up a brief write-up illustrating how Lamport and Vector timestamps are assigned.
March 6
Assignment 3 is posted. This is a written assignment and is due next week in recitation. Please read the lecture notes on clock synchronization. Because of the snow day this past week, I will not have time to cover this fully in class.
March 2
I've posted an FAQ for assignment 2.
March 2
No doubt you know, but daytime and evening classes on the New Brunswick and Piscataway Campuses are canceled for Monday, March 2, 2009.
February 26
I'll be out of email reach from Friday through Sunday. To ensure that you have time for last-minute questions about the assignment, I extended the deadline to March 4. Supplemental pages also include a bunch of demo code for both C and Java that you might find useful.
February 18

Exam 1 will take place on Monday, February 23. To help you prepare, check the Exam info link. This link contains a list of topics that you should know for this exam. You will also see a link to a study guide that provides an overview of everything we have covered to date (there's a pdf version too). I can't promise that this will cover everything on the exam but you should be in very good shape if you understand what's presented in this guide. Finally, will also see links to old exams. They should give you a good idea of what to expect on this exam.

If you browsed this content earlier, please revisit it. I've updated it from Sunday's version to include more info on .NET, remove the AFS file system since we didn't get around to covering it, and added a summary of the google cluster architecture that was covered in recitation.

February 13
Assignment 2 is posted. This is a short programming assignment and is due in about 17 days. I will be beefing up the tutorial and will post more sample code over the next few days.
February 4
I fixed a typo on slide 66 of the networking slides. Routing from one network to another is handled at the network layer, which is layer 3 of the OSI protocol stack.
February 4
Assignment 1 is posted. This is a written assignment and is due next week in recitation.
February 1
I've updated the lecture slides for this past week's lecture (intro/taxonomy) and for this coming week's lecture (networking and naming & binding). I did not update the lecture notes yet.
January 28
Tonight's recitation is canceled. Please let me know if you did not receive email announcing this.
January 21
Tonight's recitation is canceled.
January 21
Welcome!