How our young colleagues are being educated....
Miles Fidelman
mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
Fri Dec 26 03:48:34 UTC 2014
Well... to be accurate, and just a tad pedantic, the basis for TCP/IP is:
"A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," Vinton G. Cerf &
Robert E. Kahn, IEEE Trans on Comms, Vol Com-22, No 5 May 1974
Miles Fidelman
Grant Ridder wrote:
> I used Stallings a couple years ago. Cisco is not the basis of
> networking. It is the basis for TCP/IP.
>
> -Grant
>
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Miles Fidelman
> <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>> wrote:
>
> Cisco as the basis of networking material? Does nobody use Comer,
> Stallings, or Tannenbaum as basic texts anymore?
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>
> Mike Jones wrote:
>
> I am a university student that has just completed the first
> term of
> the first year of a Computer Systems and Networks course.
> Apart from a
> really out of place MATH module that did trig but not binary,
> it has
> been reasonably well run so far. The binary is covered in a
> different
> module, just not maths. The worst part of the course is
> actually the
> core networking module, which is based on Cisco material. The
> cisco
> material is HORRIBLE! those awkward "book" page things with
> the stupid
> higherarchical menu. As for the content.. a scalable network
> is one
> you can add hosts to, so what's a non-scalable network? will the
> building collapse if i plug my laptop in?
>
> As I have been following NANOG for years I do notice a lot of
> mistakes
> or "over-simplifications" that show a clear distinction
> between the
> theory in the university books and the reality on nanog, and
> demonstrate the lecturers lack of real world exposure. As a simple
> example, in IPv4 the goal is to conserve IP addresses therefore on
> point to point links you use a /30 which only wastes 50% of the
> address space. In the real world - /31's? but a /31 is
> impossible I
> hear the lecturers say...
>
> The entire campus is not only IPv4-only, but on the wifi
> network they
> actually assign globally routable addresses, then block
> protocol 41,
> so windows configures broken 6to4! Working IPv6 connectivity
> would at
> least expose students to it a little and let them play with it...
>
> Amoung the things I have heard so far: MAC Addresses are
> unique, IP
> fragments should be blocked for security reasons, and the OSI
> model
> only has 7 layers to worry about. All theoretically correct. All
> wrong.
> - Mike Jones
>
>
> On 22 December 2014 at 09:13, Javier J
> <javier at advancedmachines.us
> <mailto:javier at advancedmachines.us>> wrote:
>
> Dear NANOG Members,
>
> It has come to my attention, that higher learning
> institutions in North
> America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.
>
> I recently ran into a student of Southern New Hampshire
> University enrolled
> in the Networking/Telecom Management course and was
> shocked by what I
> learned.
>
> Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as
> BGP, MPLS and the
> fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the
> networks of the world,
> they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other
> technologies that are on
> their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the
> time this
> student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and
> skimming over
> CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education
> system as a whole?
> How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has
> never heard of RIP?
>
> If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover
> cable, it's time to
> upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education
> system.
>
> I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my
> conversation with
> one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a
> pattern emerging
> over the years with other university students at other
> schools across the
> country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed
> paths with a young IT
> professional and was literally in shock listening to the
> things they were
> being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of
> teaching what is
> currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful
> and skipping CIDR
> is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.
>
> Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges
> teaching what IPv6 is?
>
> What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one
> student half way
> through their studies that they were not properly taught
> how DNS works, and
> had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.
>
> Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be
> addressed? …..and if not
> by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?
>
>
>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
>
>
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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