Module One Tasks:

Telnet:

I was unsure about what to expect of using Telnet and was a little confused about the significance of this program when I did use it.

I completed the task as requested (many thanks to Sarah Boody for her helpful advice in the discussion board) and seemed to get the same result as everyone else. Using Telnet took me back a number of years when you would go down to the local library and look for books using their “new” computerized indexing systems; the black screen with white writing and a blinking cursor waiting for something to look for.

In all honesty, I found Telnet to be antiquated in that 1) I couldn’t use a mouse, Telnet is a keyboard application and 2) you had to know the specific address of the place that you wanted to log into (for example library.deakin.edu.au). I experimented by guessing a couple of addresses of libraries at other universities and found that I could not get onto them, whereas if I went into Google and “searched” for the same universities, I could access their libraries (as well as Deakins) through their home pages.

The graphical user interfaces (GUI) of search engines is definitely much easier to use.

Blinkenlights a blinkenmiracle:

Towel.blinkenlights.nl was a bit of fun and I can’t imagine the amount of time and effort that went into designing the program, but I really think that unless those guys actually did the program as some sort of assignment, they had way too much time on their hands. As Owen McMahon so aptly says on his blog “this guy needed a girlfriend”.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP):

Again thank you to the students who posted instructions and web addresses to help me with this task. I downloaded Filezilla and used www.montgomerycollege.edu/webinfo/filezilla.html to complete this task.

The missing word was “CAPITALIZATION”.

Again I wondered at the significance of this program and the task. The task states that “The main use for FTP these days is when people are maintaining and changing websites, It is important to a least be familiar with this Internet application. For the moment, this task test only your ability to download using ftp.” Hmmm, I have completed the task and again achieved the same results as other students, but I am not sure that I really understood what I did. I am hoping that at some stage the “ah-haa – I seee” will happen.

Internet Tools:

I found this to be an interesting task, if only to see how many hops it was taking to get from one place to another. The IP address of curtin.edu.au was 134.7.179.53.

I tried this experiment a number of times over a couple of days, at different times during the day using both Http://centrlops.net.co/ and http://network-tools.com/ and always seemed to get similar results. It took approximately 20 hops, however it would appear that Centralops.net was the quicker traceroute. Centralops.net averaged 245, whereas network-tools averaged 265.

At the same time that I was trying traceroute to curtin.edu.au, I would try to ping with both Centralops.net and net-work tools.com. Again it would appear the Centralops.net was the quicker option.

Reflecting on this task, I try to re-assure myself that we are learning this for future reference, and that although I am not 100% sure of why I need to know this information at present I believe that in time everything will fall into place.