Archive

Category Archives for "Russ White"

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Reaction: Science and Engineering

Are you a scientist, or an engineer? This question does not seem to occur to most engineers, but it does seem science has “taken the lead role” in recent history, with engineers being sometimes (or perhaps often) seen as “the folks who figure out how to make use of what scientists are discovering.” There are few fields where this seems closer to the truth than computing. Peter Denning has written an insightful article over at the ACM on this topic; a few reactions are in order.

Denning separates engineers from scientists by saying:

The first concerns the nature of their work. Engineers design and build technologies that serve useful purposes, whereas scientists search for laws explaining phenomena.

While this does seem like a useful starting point, I’m not at all certain the two fields can be cleanly separated in this way. The reality is there is probably a continuum starting from what might be called “meta-engineers,” those who’s primary goal is to implement a technology designed by someone else by mentally reverse engineering what this “someone else” has done, to the deeply focused “pure scientist,” who really does not care about the practical application, but is rather simply searching Continue reading

SLAAC and DHCPv6

When deploying IPv6, one of the fundamental questions the network engineer needs to ask is: DHCPv6, or SLAAC? As the argument between these two has reached almost political dimensions, perhaps a quick look at the positive and negative attributes of each solution are. Originally, the idea was that IPv6 addresses would be created using stateless configuration (SLAAC). The network parts of the address would be obtained by listening for a Router Advertisement (RA), and the host part would be built using a local (presumably unique) physical (MAC) address. In this way, a host can be connected to the network, and come up and run, without any manual configuration. Of course, there is still the problem of DNS—how should a host discover which server it should contact to resolve domain names? To resolve this part, the DHCPv6 protocol would be used. So in IPv6 configuration, as initially conceived, the information obtained from RA would be combined with DNS information from DHCPv6 to fully configure an IPv6 host when it is attached to the network.

There are several problems with this scheme, as you might expect. The most obvious is that most network operators do not want to deploy two protocols to Continue reading

1 74 75 76 77 78 165