CIS 456, Open Systems Networking.

The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundation of
knowledge of the Internet and its Protocols. The material covered in
this course is necessary for, among others, later study of firewalls,
research on new Internet Protocols, research on Traffic Phenomena in the 
Internet, etc. Students taking Cisco Certification exams have told me 
that taking CIS 456 had been a great help. 

In the spring of 2006 the book for CIS 456 will be 

Comer, Douglas E.
Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol I:
Principles, Protocols, and Architecture, fifth edition.
Pearson / Prentice Hall

The NJIT Bookstore has copies of this book.

Feel free to start reading!

While in future semesters the book might change, the content of the
course will change only slowly.

Roughly, the course covers the chapters 1 - 16 of Comer, plus
selected topics from later chapters and from other sources, such as RFCs 
(IETF Requests for Comments, see www.ietf.org).

Material covered includes:

The IP addressing schemes; The interaction between logical addresses
(of course IP) and physical addresses (in this course always ethernet
adresses); ARP and RARP; Routing Tables and Routing; Routing and
Forwarding; Classless Interdomain Routing; The IP and ICMP Protocols;
The UDP and TCP Protocols; The layering models in OSI and TCP/IP:
physical address - logical address - protocol identifier - portnumber;
IGMP; Routing methods (RIP, OSPF, BGP); The Domain Name System; The
World Wide Web and http.

In addition, students will be made familiar with the use of packet
sniffers such as TCPdump.  Packet sniffers make a copy of (in
principle) all IP packets passing through some interface, and present
that information to the user, for example in hexadecimal
representation. Students will develop the detailed knowledge of IP,
UDP, TCP etc headers necessary to understand the output of packet
sniffers.

In addition, students will be made familar with tools like ping, 
nslookup, dig, traceroute.

The course includes a project that involves programming. In the past
this used to be writing a program that emulates certain router 
behaviors.

Students who read this page sufficiently long before the semester starts,
and want to read ahead, can start by reading the first 3 chapters in 
Comer. This is neither required nor expected, but not a bad investment.
(Whether you take CIS 456 or not). 
Further, students can obtain IETF RFC 1700 and read the first page, 
and obtain IETF RFC 3232 and read in its entirety (very short).
If that is not enough for you: Log on to any Unix or Solaris or Linux 
system and get the ``manual pages'' for ping etc:
man ping
man nslookup
man dig
man traceroute
man tcpdump  (You must be root to use tcpdump, but anybody can look at 
              the man pages)
man netstat  (Try ``netstat -r'' and ``netstat -rn'')
man arp      (Since you are not root, all you can do is ``arp -a'' and 
              ``arp -an'')
man ifconfig (Since you are not root, all you can do is ``ifconfig -a'')

Warning:

Some of these tools can be used in Denial of Service Attacks. 
Do not do that!

All students must adhere to the Guidelines for responsible
use of Computer Resources:  
http://www.njit.edu/policies/usagepolicy.php

In the first place, that is good manners. In the second place,
if you do not you will loose computer priviliges, and you may be 
suspended. 

The most important rule is: use common sense. 
Think about what impact your activity wil have on other users,
on the network, on other computers, switches, and routers.  

Do not turn on anything you do not know how to turn off!
Read the story of the ``sorcerer's apprentice''!

Never ping or traceroute (or so) to a broadcast address or to a 
multicast address.

Before you take the course, much of these man pages may sound like
gibberish to you. At the end of the course, it will all make sense.

To understand what man pages are all about, you can do ``man man''.