Hands-On Networking Thorsten Herfet, Andreas Schmidt, Pablo Gil Pereira

Dear students,

we have now uploaded the FINAL version of the LLDP tests, which will be used by us to grade your submissions. We are sure that you can fulfil these tests thoroughly and without inconsistencies in your code (as we do with our reference implementation). For now, please follow the guidance "tests > specification", as the tests are used to grade your submission.

For more information on how to get the final tests, consider this news entry.

If you have any problems, feel free to send us an email or stop by our offices.

Sorry again for the inconvenience and thanks to those of you who told us about the leftover issues.

Regards,
The HON'18 Team

Dear Students,

The tests for the LLDP project have been updated again, as new bugs were found for some of you. Please, make sure you download and unzip the last version following the same instructions as in the previous message.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks to those of you who told us about this issue.

Regards,

The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

As some bugs were detected in the tests for the LLDP project, we have generated a new set of tests. You can download them from the following link:

https://cms.nt.uni-saarland.de/hon18/dl/61/New_tests.zip

Once you have downloaded the zip file, just copy it into the 'test/' directory in your LLDP project and run the command

unzip New_tests.zip

The you will be asked if the files should be replaced. Here you type "A" and the new tests will be placed in the folder.

IMPORTANT: Please make sure your implementation passes the new tests, as we will use them to correct the project.

Regards,

The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

to clarify the passing criteria for the MMCP project, here are the results of our reference implementation. To pass the project, the residual error ratios must be at least as low as the reference implementation's. Runtimes depend on your hardware, so there might be differences, but must be below the upper bounds mentioned on the task sheet. This also holds for the redundancy you add.

Residual / Errors = Ratio     | Measured   / Ideal Redundancy | Runtime | Pattern
       0 /    210 =     0.00% |   1.00e+00 /         4.86e-06 |    151s | Benevolent_Pattern_1.txt
       0 /    190 =     0.00% |   1.00e+00 /         4.40e-06 |    144s | Benevolent_Pattern_2.txt
       0 /    190 =     0.00% |   1.00e+00 /         4.40e-06 |    142s | Benevolent_Pattern_3.txt
     118 /  21634 =     0.55% |   1.00e+00 /         5.01e-04 |    149s | Adversary_Pattern_1.txt
     135 /  21932 =     0.62% |   1.00e+00 /         5.08e-04 |    166s | Adversary_Pattern_2.txt
     116 /  21851 =     0.53% |   1.00e+00 /         5.06e-04 |    139s | Adversary_Pattern_3.txt
     186 /    442 =    42.08% |   1.00e+00 /         1.02e-05 |    142s | Burst_Pattern_1.txt
     252 /    502 =    50.20% |   1.00e+00 /         1.16e-05 |    150s | Burst_Pattern_2.txt
     366 /    654 =    55.96% |   1.00e+00 /         1.52e-05 |    149s | Burst_Pattern_3.txt

Regards
The HON'18 Team

IMPORTANT: Register in HISPOS and CMS!

Dear students,

we would like to inform you that you MUST register in both of the following two systems if you want to take part in the exam:

1) the LSF HISPOS system of Saarland University (HON can be found in the exam group "Modules Computer Science")

2) our CMS (the respective button is on your profile page).

Please note that the deadline is one week before the exam takes place on March, 27th.

UPDATE 1:

If you have problems with registering (e.g. you cannot find the HON exam in LSF), please contact studium@cs.uni-saarland.de and ask them for help. For all students in Bachelor and Master Computer Science PO 2006 and CuK PO 2007, you MUST register this way.

UPDATE 2:

We were told that as of today (16th March) there is a significant difference in the registrations in HISPOS and our CMS. Please again make sure that you are registered in BOTH systems. The registrations close on 20th March.

Good luck with the projects and the exam preparation.

Regards,
The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

there was a problem with Chrome PDF export which made some parts of the text in the slides disappear due to a missing font. Some "missing text" is very easy to spot (cursive text missing in the middle of the paragraph), but other parts might be easily overlooked. I have uploaded all slide decks again, so please re-download and make sure that you work on these when preparing for the exam.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks to those of you who told us about this issue.

Regards

The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

due to a bigger event happening in E1.3 tomorrow, Fr 2nd March, we have to hold the units in E2.5 HS 002 (mathematics building with the lecture halls, right behind Günter Hotz Hörsaal and the Infomath library).

Please note that today's lecture still happens in E1.3 HS 002 as usual. See you there!

Best Regards,
The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

we have now finished most of the lectures, except...

• Multimedia Coding on Thursday at 13:00,
• Software-Defined Networking on Friday at 10:00 and
• Course Wrap-Up & Project Details on Friday at 15:00.

Please note that we do not have lectures or tutorials on We, 13:00 - 15:00 and Th, 08:30 - 12:00. During this time you should work on the assignments that you have not yet finished. In case you need help, just stop by at the Office Hour in C6.3 Room 9.08 during these time slots. If nobody is there, you can simply come to our offices 10.06 (Pablo), 10.07 (Andreas) or 9.07 (Frank).

Regards,
The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

during U02 we found that inside the LabVM, the root user is using Python 2.7 by default. As one of the projects requires you to run a program with sudo (as a root user) and validate that it works with Python 3.6., we recommend that you run the following command in your VM once:

sudo printf 'alias python=python3.6\nalias python3=python3.6' | sudo tee /root/.bash_aliases

Please make sure that you apply this change so that you don't accidentally submit project code that does not work with Python 3.6.

UPDATE:

We found out that this change is not enough to make "sudo python" use Python 3.6. In order to achieve this, you might add another alias to your HON user. The following line will achieve this if you use the existing LabVM default configuration:

printf '\nalias sudo="sudo "' | tee -a /home/hon/.bash_aliases

Eventually, your file /home/hon/.bash_aliases should look like this:

alias python=python3.6
alias python3=python3.6
alias sudo="sudo "

Regards,
The HON'18 Team

Dear students,

welcome to Hands-On Networking 2018. This is a brief reminder that the course starts next week Monday, 19th of February at 08:30 in E1.3 HS002.

Please note that we start working with the Lab VM (virtual machine) at 10:00 on the same day and downloading 2GB of data together with 20 others students over the same wireless LAN is not a good idea (if you wonder why... don't worry you will learn it in this course). So please try downloading it from home or even better from within the University network BEFORE Monday.

We are looking forward to having you in the course. See you next week!

Regards
The HON'18 Team