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

Dear students,

We would like to inform you that the exam results have already been published.

We have also agreed on a date for the re-exam and we can confirm you that it will take place on 29th June 16:00-17:30 in E2.2 HS 001 (Günter-Hotz lecture hall).

Best regards,

The HON20 Team

COVID-19 Regulations of University

Dear Students,

we are looking forward to welcoming you for the HON exam tomorrow. Since the University is still in only limited operation and has established clear rules we need you to:

1. Be there on time and stay outside of the building. We will allow entrance one by one sufficiently prior to the exam start.
2. Enter the building with sufficient social distance. We'll make sure that the distance is kept in the lecture hall during the entire exam.
3. Wear mouth/nose protection (aka masks). This is strongly recommended! 
4. Wash your hands properly. We will provide desinfectant at the entrance in case you didn't have the chance to do so.
5. Stay seated at the end of the exam to allow for an organized leave, one by one with sufficient social distance.
6. Bring you matriculation card and an ID; we will advise where to put it for inspection during the exam.

IMPORTANT: You are NOT allowed to participate in case you have one of the following symptoms:

1. Cough
2. Throat ache
3. Sneezing
4. Diarrhea
5. Fever
6. Pains in the limbs
7. Loss of smelling sense
8. Loss of tasting sense

For the sake of not infecting others in case of one of those symptoms please refrain from participation. The re-exam of course is available for you! In case we recognize one of those symptoms we are obliged to prevent you from participating.

See you tomorrow in good shape and health,

Thorsten Herfet

UPDATE: The exam Q&A happens on April 29th, 2020 12:00 - 14:00 in Mattermost. Also note that the new main exam takes place in E2.2 HS 001 (Günter-Hotz lecture hall).

Dear students,

as we are now allowed to do presence exams, we have the following plan: The original re-exam on May 06th, 2020 16:00 - 18:00 becomes the main exam and happens in E2.2 HS 001 (Günter-Hotz lecture hall).

Please make sure that your registration in CMS is up-to-date by April 30th. Afterwards, we are going to send the CMS-list to the examination office and they are going to import it, so that the CMS and LSF registration are identical.

The new date for the postponed exam Q&A is going to be announced soon April 29th, 12:00 - 14:00 in Mattermost (in particular this channel). This is one dedicated time slot where we are present and answer questions, but feel free to drop your doubts and questions in there outside this time slot or send us (Sven, Andreas, Pablo) a direct message. We also encourage you to use this to help each other out, in case we do not find the time to respond to your questions. Based on the experience from the project office hour, we believe that this should work out very well.

We wish you good luck for your exam preparations. Stay healthy and stay home. We are looking forward to seeing you soon again.

Best regards,
The HON20 Team

Dear students,

due to the difficult situation SARS-Cov-2 causes for us all and especially for you, we decided to despite the earlier announcement offer AVCN (former TCII) in the summer term!!!
We will adapt the lecture to pay respect to a) the shorter term and b) the potential requirement to offer at least parts of the course remotely.
Please check the course website: https://cms.nt.uni-saarland.de/avcn_20/.

Best regards, take care and stay healthy!

Thorsten Herfet and Team

• The exam is not going to take place on 31st March.
• The exam Q&A is also not happening on 27th March. If you want to chat about the content of the lecture, please use the mattermost chat we provide.
• The project deadline is going to stay the same. The projects are not in the category "Qualifizierungsaufgaben" as these are not the final theses of a study program. As the projects are also rather short and can be completed with a manageable amount of effort, you should finish them in the next two weeks.

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 HON20 Team

• Use your stud.uni-saarland.de address for identification. Other addresses are not permitted.
• Do not share the link with others. We will ban users that are not part of HON in order to avoid this place being hijacked by whoever.
• Make sure that you understand the rules of online etiquette (consider e.g. this article: https://achievevirtual.org/7-rules-for-online-etiquette/). We will take appropriate measures if you misbehave.

• First of all, please don't be afraid or panick. What we are doing here is a precaution and attempt to slow down the spreading to avoid this thing hitting the weak in our society.
• Please don't hesitate to send us an email if you have any problems with our course material. We would do our best to reply individually, but if it turns out that many people ask similar questions and need help we will consider setting up other means (e.g. curating a FAQ).
• Make sure that your LabVM is working and that you have a well-known environment to do the practical projects in.
• Materials are going to be published in accordance to the schedule, so you can "join" the course tomorrow as usual, but (maybe) from home.
• Regarding the exam and the exam Q&A, please stay tuned. As the situation is that dynamic at the moment we have to see and adapt.

• U25 applies the concepts of U24 (multimedia communications) and is a pure pen-and-paper exercise, for which we don't think personal presence is required. If you have problems, just tell us.
• U26 is a lecture on Software-Defined Networking. While this is an extremely relevant topic in practice, it is advanced to an extent that we don't ask questions about it in the exam. Still, we will upload the slides and cordially invite you to have a look at it.
• U27 is a unit that applies Software-Defined Networking in practice, so it is highly recommended to improve your understanding of the topic.
• U28 is the course wrap-up that primarily gives information on how the course progresses (exam, etc.) but also highlights some opportunities for you (vacant student researcher jobs as well as potential topics for theses).

• The projects will be released tomorrow and include a self-explaining text that has already been tested by HON iterations that happened before. Still, you might have questions and we are happy to answer the via email (or FAQ, see above).

REMINDER: Please download the Lab-VM as described below. We are going to use it for the first time on Monday, March 02nd at 10:15!

Dear students,

welcome to the Hands-On Networking 2020 course. We are going to start in less than two months on March, 02nd 2020 at 08:30. A preliminary timetable can be found on this webpage and is going to be updated over the next weeks.

Until then, we are wishing you good luck for your exams and hope you can have some "mental recharging" days, before we start with our intensive course.

We highly recommend that you use one of the next days when you are at the University to download and setup our Lab-VM (a virtual machine used for the practical units and projects in HON). Downloading it on March 02nd is a bad idea because (a) you might not be the only one downloading and competing for a data rate share of the lecture hall's access point (you are going to learn more about this in the lecture), (b) downloading and setup takes time, which you don't want to lose right at the start of a fast-paced two weeks course. You can use both VMware Player and Oracle's VirtualBox, but please be aware that we ourselves are using Oracle's VirtualBox and hence can provide better support for you if you chose to use the same. Both tools are free and available for (nearly) all platforms, so you don't lose anything by running VirtualBox.

Apart from that, brushing up your Python skills might be a good idea. There are tons of free course and online material out there; starting points would be this, this and this.

Best regards
The HON20 Team