Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....
In addition to my 9 to 5 job of network engineer, I teach evening courses at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first 2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full 4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security. I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a traditional 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies, and are updated only when they must. Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who are better prepared for a job from day one. Just my 2 cents. P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult networking concepts. On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Javier J jav...@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?
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Marshall Eubanks marshall.euba...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 11:16 PM, Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us wrote: But I can ping them. https://nknetobserver.github.io/ And what would it matter if its offline, they already block their population. What exactly is offline? The Kim of the moment, the elite, a few journalists, and the like. And, assuming they actually did the exploit in country and didn't outsource it to the Chaos Computer Club (or whomever), their crack team of Sony takedown hackers. There is a separate, inside DPRK only, network for the hoi polloi. Regards Marshall On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 9:05 PM, Valdis Kletnieks valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: Any of you guys want to fess up? :) http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/north-koreas-internet-goes-dark-376097859903 (Yes, I know, they're saying it's a DDoS, not a routing hack...) The DPRK Internet is apparently back. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30584093 I suspect its absence was much more interesting that its presence will be. I am reminded that the Chaos Computer Club has done a lot of good work for electronic freedom. I was remembering events (perhaps unfairly) from decades ago, did not mean to cast any aspersions on their current activities, and am sorry if that offended anyone. Regards Marshall Eubanks
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Valdis Kletnieks valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: Any of you guys want to fess up? :) http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/north-koreas-internet-goes-dark-376097859903 (Yes, I know, they're saying it's a DDoS, not a routing hack...) I was hoping that everyone just put 175.45.176.0/22 in their bogon list. -- Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
Why you suggest it? On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Joe Hamelin j...@nethead.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Valdis Kletnieks valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: Any of you guys want to fess up? :) http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/north-koreas-internet-goes-dark-376097859903 (Yes, I know, they're saying it's a DDoS, not a routing hack...) I was hoping that everyone just put 175.45.176.0/22 in their bogon list. -- Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474 -- Sincerely yours, Pavel Odintsov
Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....
On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Ken Chase m...@sizone.org wrote: Learning how to do CIDR math is a major core component of the coursework? Im thinking that this is about a 30 minute module in the material, once you know binary, powers of 2 and some addition and subtraction (all of which is taught in most schools by when, first year highschool?) you should be done with it. So... just finished up teaching a network course because the Math/Comp Sci dept had lost professors I can tell you it was really tough getting across the idea of four bytes of dotted decimal from binary and THEN subnet masks and getting the students THEN to convert to CIDR. Many glazed eyeballs. We asked some of the students who had taken the network class in prior years and it was true that they learned very little of the things we consider basic, as Javier mentioned. The profs seemed to have been focusing on programming more than neworking per se, even tho the book they were using covered the technology as well as socket programming. We covered all of the things in Javier's initial rant and more, like the principles of TCP congestion control and the history of packet switching. It was fun being able to let them in on some real world things, like say the sinking feeling of making a change in a network and then the phone starts ringing off the hook :-)Unfortunately, this was likely a one-time deal that the students got to really learn a couple of things about networking. Dennis Bohn Adelphi University
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
What would be the point in blocking them? They don't even have electricity in the country, what would I worry about coming out of their IP block that wouldn't be more interesting than dangerous. Pretty obvious if it was really them behind the Sony hack, it was outsourced. http://www.standupamericaus.org/sua/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/North-Korea-at-night.jpg On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Joe Hamelin j...@nethead.com wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Valdis Kletnieks valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: Any of you guys want to fess up? :) http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/north-koreas-internet-goes-dark-376097859903 (Yes, I know, they're saying it's a DDoS, not a routing hack...) I was hoping that everyone just put 175.45.176.0/22 in their bogon list. -- Joe Hamelin, W7COM, Tulalip, WA, 360-474-7474
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
On Dec 23, 2014, at 11:53 AM, Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us wrote: What would be the point in blocking them? They don't even have electricity in the country, what would I worry about coming out of their IP block that wouldn't be more interesting than dangerous. Pretty obvious if it was really them behind the Sony hack, it was outsourced. For the few elite that do have Internet in DPRK it would be 1) a big inconvenience which would annoy them a lot and 2) they have to transmit what they want attacked to the outsourced crew (whoever they might be) somehow. I doubt the outsourced group has a fax#. signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
RE: How our young colleagues are being educated....
I've gone through the CNA (Cisco Networking Academy) program at a US college and got a 4 year Bachelors of Science from there. The program took me through CCNP level courses and prepared me well for taking the CCNP level certs. They also touched on a broad swath of technology from monitoring systems (namely MRTG and PRTG), to wireless, to audio/video basics, etc. And it follows the CCNP (and CCNA for those level courses). So when those change, like they did a few years ago from the 4 test to 3 test versions the curriculum was modified accordingly. Now yes there is some emphasis on a lot of older technologies, but they don't know where your career will go. So while I probably won't run into frame relay much, I could. And how routing protocols work in that environment are not the same as Ethernet based topologies. The largest issue I found with my program I went through was that it simply was very arbitrary and isolated from what the real world is. And part of that is that they taught based off the Cisco courses. But it would have been nice to have some classes that were more real world interactions of how things work. For example, BGP communities or AS prepending were not touched in the courses. Or how video/voice is done in the real world (nobody really does a CLI phone system in Cisco VoIP phones which is what we were using). And we never touched Nexus stuff, which was still new at the time to be fair. We also learned on PIX firewalls and only had a few ASA's. But overall it gave a fairly good foundation to build on, which was the point for me. I believe that networking is more akin to a trade than standard 4 year program in a business degree. Every situation, career, environment does things differently. Whereas accounting is going to be pretty much the same anywhere, just with some different applications used potentially. -Original Message- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Kinkaid, Kyle Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 10:38 AM To: Javier J Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated In addition to my 9 to 5 job of network engineer, I teach evening courses at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first 2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full 4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security. I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a traditional 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies, and are updated only when they must. Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who are better prepared for a job from day one. Just my 2 cents. P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult networking concepts. On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Javier J jav...@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
Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....
When I took my CCNA a bit over ten years ago, it was terribly out of date. That said, I beleive I was the last class to go through on that version. The next one added OSPF and some other things. At the time, though, Ethernet belonged within a building. If you were wanting to connect multiple buildings together, bust out those T1s. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Kyle Kinkaid kkink...@usgs.gov To: Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 9:38:02 AM Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated In addition to my 9 to 5 job of network engineer, I teach evening courses at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first 2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full 4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security. I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a traditional 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies, and are updated only when they must. Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who are better prepared for a job from day one. Just my 2 cents. P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult networking concepts. On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Javier J jav...@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?
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
I was hoping that everyone just put 175.45.176.0/22 in their bogon list. why? is it something despicable such as the dee cee propaganda engine? randy
Re: North Korean internet goes dark (yes, they had one)
On 12/23/14 12:40 PM, Randy Bush wrote: I was hoping that everyone just put 175.45.176.0/22 in their bogon list. why? is it something despicable such as the dee cee propaganda engine? Because poorly targeted prefix filtering works so well for spam and ddos... except that it doesn't. randy signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....
Last time I taught, I lectured (senior-level 3-credit elective) on calculating the efficiency of Ethernet and why it was no good above 10Mbps. On Dec 23, 2014, at 15:29, Mike Hammett na...@ics-il.net wrote: At the time, though, Ethernet belonged within a building. If you were wanting to connect multiple buildings together, bust out those T1s. Fortunately for society, I *stopped* teaching in 1998. Hope it was soon enough.
Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....
I will agree with most of the others that took the Cisco academy courses at the local community college. it all depends on the instructor. My 1st year was taught in the evenings by a full time Network Engineer. Best 3 terms I had. The problem was that year two was taught be a bunch of old guys that used to teach electronics and DB classes. So everything the old DB guy taught was how the network was like a DB. I think that getting real world teachers are the only way to fix it. unfortunately the program went away as the CC could not pay for new hardware.. Scott On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Mike Hammett na...@ics-il.net wrote: When I took my CCNA a bit over ten years ago, it was terribly out of date. That said, I beleive I was the last class to go through on that version. The next one added OSPF and some other things. At the time, though, Ethernet belonged within a building. If you were wanting to connect multiple buildings together, bust out those T1s. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Kyle Kinkaid kkink...@usgs.gov To: Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 9:38:02 AM Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated In addition to my 9 to 5 job of network engineer, I teach evening courses at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first 2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full 4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security. I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a traditional 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies, and are updated only when they must. Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who are better prepared for a job from day one. Just my 2 cents. P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult networking concepts. On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Javier J jav...@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
RE: How our young colleagues are being educated....
Yes when I took networks as part of my CS degree 12 years ago most of it was socket programming and had very little to do with infrastructure management. I don't think that has changed much talking to recent graduates. Phil -Original Message- From: Kinkaid, Kyle kkink...@usgs.gov Sent: 12/23/2014 10:40 AM To: Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us Cc: nanog@nanog.org nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated In addition to my 9 to 5 job of network engineer, I teach evening courses at a US community college (for you non-USers, it's a place for the first 2-years of post-secondary education, typically before proceeding to a full 4-year university). The community college I work at participates in the Cisco Academy program which trains students to get specific Cisco certifications like CCNA, CCNP, CCNA Security. I feel like the Cisco Academy program does a pretty good job at training the students and and addresses many of the issues you found with education in US. Without knowing for sure, your description sounds like that of a traditional 4-year university curriculum. The Cisco Academy program focuses on being up-to-date (revisions happen every 4 years or so) and emphasizes working with (preferably physical) routers and switches from day one. I've found 4-year universities, if they have networking courses at all, cover too much theoretical material, emphasize legacy technologies, and are updated only when they must. Further, when in front of students, I always try and relate the material to either what they have experienced in their professional lives (if they are already working) or to what I see in my job regular. I try and keep the students focused on what's practical and only discuss theory and abstract ideas when necessary. I might not be able to do that if I was a professor at a 4-year university, having worked hard on a Ph.D. then on getting tenure. I think it's important to seek to be educated at schools and seek to hire from schools where the instructors have copious practical experience and, preferably, experience which is concurrent with their teaching experience. That will hopefully get you a corps of workers who are better prepared for a job from day one. Just my 2 cents. P.S. This is not to denigrate the value of a Ph.D. or academia. My mentor in my network engineering career has a Ph.D. in Mathematics and having that high-level education was a boon to his being able to understand difficult networking concepts. On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Javier J jav...@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?
