Completing this exam to the best of your ability is required for entry into the course.
This is a take home diagnostic exam. It is due at 9:00PM, Wednesday, 1/23/2002. Send your answers via email to the instructor (rmartin@cs.rutgers.edu). Use text or HTML formats only.
This exam should take you 1-2 hours to answer. Work alone. You can use the Internet, or any other non-human resource. If you use an outside resource to answer a question, note it your answer (a URL is fine). No answer has to be longer than 1 or 2 paragraphs.
The purpose of this exam is to let me know how much background you have on the material. Don't let the quality of your answers be inconsistent with your performance during the rest of the class!
If you can't answer most of the questions in 24 hours by yourself, you're not ready to take this class. Please take CS552, Graduate computer networks, first.
What is the purpose of DNS? Explain how DNS lookups work, but be brief.
Explain how the program "traceroute" works. Explain why sometimes it gives incomplete information.
What is a Denial-of-Service attack? What is a typical method an attacker uses in an DoS attack?
What is the most important difference between HTTP version 1.0 and 1.1?
Write the pseudo-code for a client and server connecting to each other over a TCP socket.
What do "layer-4" and "layer-7" switches do? How are these similar or different from a normal Internet routers?
Explain the difference between an integrated services network and a differentiated services network.
What's a Zipf distribution? How is it similar or different from other common distributions (and what are they)? For incoming HTTP requests, why might we care what the distribution is?
What is self-similarity, with respect to network traffic? What important property would, or would not, hold if network traffic exhibits self-similar behavior?
For a typical search engine, what is an inverted index? How fast does an inverted index grow as the web grows?