Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Wayne E Bouchard]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 08:40:52AM -0600, John Kristoff wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 19:21:34 -0500
> Miles Fidelman  wrote:
> 
> > Cisco as the basis of networking material? Does nobody use Comer, 
> > Stallings, or Tannenbaum as basic texts anymore?
> 
> I currently use a Comer book.  I've also used a Tannenbaum book in the
> past, but not recently.  My favorite book, when I've used it was Radia
> Perlman's.
> 
> Increasingly I'm seeing a trend away from actually relying on books if
> even requiring them to be read anymore.  This is both a trend with
> faculty and students.  I frequently get asked if the book is required,
> even when the course page clearly says it is.  Students and often
> faculty often I find rely too heavily on Wikipedia pages, which I've
> found myself going to update since they lead to wrong assumptions and
> answers in questions I've assigned.
> 
> I like to augment, as many faculty do, classic or timely research papers
> into assignments so that students are at least forced to look at
> something other than vendor white papers and blog posts found in search
> engines.
> 
> John

Then again, no course on networking can be complete without a
presentation involving ways in which things are not being used as
originally designed because someone had an idea of how they could do
it differently, for better or worse. (Ala the contradiction in terms
that is "HTTP streaming". Routers two continents away crashing as a
result of eBGP packets for interprovider VPNs is another good one.)
Nor can you call a course complete without a case study of where
things do not work as intended and either very large pFail is the
result or where a more complicated hack fix is needed as a workaround.
Especially relevant with interoperability concerns when multiple
vendors are involved.

Those sorts of things you likewise do not often find in text books or
white papers and probably not on Wikipedia either but they are at the
core of what engineering and operations has contend with day by day.
(Too often people conflate "engineering" with "architecture" and while
they are very much related, they are not one and the same.)

-Wayne

---
Wayne Bouchard
w...@typo.org
Network Dude
http://www.typo.org/~web/

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[John Kristoff]

On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 19:21:34 -0500
Miles Fidelman  wrote:

> Cisco as the basis of networking material? Does nobody use Comer, 
> Stallings, or Tannenbaum as basic texts anymore?

I currently use a Comer book.  I've also used a Tannenbaum book in the
past, but not recently.  My favorite book, when I've used it was Radia
Perlman's.

Increasingly I'm seeing a trend away from actually relying on books if
even requiring them to be read anymore.  This is both a trend with
faculty and students.  I frequently get asked if the book is required,
even when the course page clearly says it is.  Students and often
faculty often I find rely too heavily on Wikipedia pages, which I've
found myself going to update since they lead to wrong assumptions and
answers in questions I've assigned.

I like to augment, as many faculty do, classic or timely research papers
into assignments so that students are at least forced to look at
something other than vendor white papers and blog posts found in search
engines.

John

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Måns Nilsson]

Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated Date: Fri, Dec 26, 
2014 at 02:56:40AM -0500 Quoting William Herrin (b...@herrin.us):
 
> In the real world you often assign a /32 to a loopback address on each
> router and make all of the serial interfaces borrow that address (ip
> unnumbered in Cisco parlance) which wastes no addresses.

Why would you want to waste 79228162514264337593543950336 addresses on a 
loopback? 

More seriously, why does this discussion only briefly mention IPv6? Every
client comes with it (aggressvely) enabled -- it is there despite the
fat / happy parts of the networking community sitting on their legacy
space and laughing at Asia.

I've had, as mentioned earlier, a "cisco graduate" as intern and then
colleague for a year now. He's a fast learner, and that was needed. No
v6. Not much MPLS. No ISIS. Barely eBGP. No iBGP, especially not in
conjunction with a link-state IGP. Lots of RIP, Flame Delay and EIGRP. 

There are two problems; 

* The academic community is either outdated or married to a
  vendor-specific course -- and that marriage is not very 
  academic, IMNSHO. Academia must be vendor agnostic.

* The vendor courses are too enterprisey, and an outdated 
  enterprise at that. There is no course in "running a 
  sensible chunk of the Internet". 

And this in a world where the largest innovation the last 5 years is
abstraction (as in virtualisation and to some extent SDN). Not in 
protocols. Should be reasonably easy to keep up.

-- 
Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina
MN-1334-RIPE +46 705 989668
So this is what it feels like to be potato salad


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[William Herrin]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 7:06 PM, Mike Jones  wrote:
> 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?

Hi Mike,

A few starting points for interesting insight:

https://bill.herrin.us/network/bgpcost.html

According to the estimate, it costs about $8000/year (pennies here and
pennies there, they add up) to add a single multihomed network to the
Internet before you even consider the bytes sent and received. There
are around 500,000 such networks. If 10,000,000 such networks were
required, we would have difficulty building routers that could work.

Indeed, in the 90's the Internet's 50,000ish networks caught up to and
nearly exceeded the routers we were capable of building. We came close
to having to triage by cutting networks off the Internet.

That's an example of something that scales poorly.

On the other hand, adding a DNS zone costs $10/year or less. We could
add a billion or a trillion more and it might add a few million
dollars total to the cost of a few root and TLD name servers.

The DNS scales well.


> 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...

In the real world you often assign a /32 to a loopback address on each
router and make all of the serial interfaces borrow that address (ip
unnumbered in Cisco parlance) which wastes no addresses.

With non-point to point links there are other tricks you can play to
avoid wasting more addresses than strictly necessary.


> Amoung the things I have heard so far: MAC Addresses are unique,

Except when they're not. The 802.3 standard is ambiguous about whether
a MAC address should be unique per interface or unique per host. Sun
(now Oracle) took the latter view and assigned the same MAC address to
every Ethernet port on a particular host leading to hideously confused
Ethernet switches.

The ambiguity even creeps into Linux. Unless the behavior is
overridden with a sysctl, Linux will happily answer an arp request on
eth0 for an IP address that lives on eth1.


> IP fragments should be blocked for security reasons,

Not a smart move, IMO. In a stateful firewall (e.g. NAT) let the
firewall reassemble the packets. In a stateless firewall, block the
first fragment only, and only if it's too short for whatever filtering
you intend to apply. Any first fragment that's not an attack will be
at least a few hundred bytes long.

Also, pity the fool who blocks ICMP because he breaks TCP at the same
time. Path MTU discovery requires ICMP destination unreachable
messages to function. TCP will screech to a halt every time it
attempts to send a packet larger than the path MTU until the host
receives the ICMP notification.


> and the OSI model
> only has 7 layers to worry about. All theoretically correct. All
> wrong.

Not exactly. The OSI layers exhibit a basically correct understanding
of packet networks. They just don't stack so neatly as the authors
expected. In particular, we keep finding excuses to stack additional
layer 2's and 3's on top of underlying layer 2's and 3's. We give this
names like "MPLS" and "VPN."

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems . Web: 
May I solve your unusual networking challenges?

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Laurent Dumont]

Merry Christmas! (Even if slightly late...)

I absolutely agree. The certification by itself doesn't prove much 
beyond a passing interest in networking and an ability to retain a fair 
amount of information. I suspect it's mostly a question of creating some 
kind of standard to judge applicants. It's also worth mentioning that I 
bet that many HR departments are actively hunting for keywords such as 
certifications acronyms.


It was just a bit sad to see the certification itself as the "real" goal 
of the program.


Cheers!

On 12/25/2014 11:42 PM, Alain Hebert wrote:

Well let start with: Happy Holidays.

In my line of work anyone with a CCNA get put at the bottom of the pile =D

We're looking for proactive associates and found that applicants which
present themselves as a CCNA engineer foremost are only just that: Someone
that could follow the course and bother to pass it.

Best deal is to get Cisco 1000V image (or GNS) and a Virtual Server (about
$600 used with 72G of RAM lately, and you do not need huge amount of
disks) and start making test beds for real world needs.

The only drawback is that you may make the interviewer worried about his
own job =D

Good luck.


The Cisco "Networking Academy" program was used throughout my
"CEGEP"(End of high-school/first college year equivalent in the US)
education in Quebec. There was no deviation from the course work and the
aim was to get the student CCNA certified at the end.

On 12/25/2014 7:21 PM, Miles Fidelman 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 
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 

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Alain Hebert]

Well let start with: Happy Holidays.

In my line of work anyone with a CCNA get put at the bottom of the pile =D

We're looking for proactive associates and found that applicants which
present themselves as a CCNA engineer foremost are only just that: Someone
that could follow the course and bother to pass it.

Best deal is to get Cisco 1000V image (or GNS) and a Virtual Server (about
$600 used with 72G of RAM lately, and you do not need huge amount of
disks) and start making test beds for real world needs.

The only drawback is that you may make the interviewer worried about his
own job =D

Good luck.

> The Cisco "Networking Academy" program was used throughout my
> "CEGEP"(End of high-school/first college year equivalent in the US)
> education in Quebec. There was no deviation from the course work and the
> aim was to get the student CCNA certified at the end.
>
> On 12/25/2014 7:21 PM, Miles Fidelman 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 
>>> 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.

>>>

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Laurent Dumont]

The Cisco "Networking Academy" program was used throughout my 
"CEGEP"(End of high-school/first college year equivalent in the US) 
education in Quebec. There was no deviation from the course work and the 
aim was to get the student CCNA certified at the end.


On 12/25/2014 7:21 PM, Miles Fidelman 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  
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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Miles Fidelman]

FYI,  just checked, and,
Comer's "Internetworking with TCP/IP" seems to be in its 6th edition, 
published 2013
Stallings' "Data and Computer Communications" seems to be in its 10th 
edition, also 2013
Tannenbaum's "Computer Networks" seems to be in its 5th edition, 
published 2010


So... all still pretty current.  (My personal copies are just a bit more 
dated, first editions that probably do qualify as "historical 
references," along with my old standby - the "DDN Protocol Handbook," 
complete with the MIL-STD versions of some classic RFPs :-)


Cheers,

Miles


Randy wrote:

Interesting that you mention Tannenbaum - was required as part of my grad 
school coursework eons ago - provided me with the foundation for everything 
else to come.

Perhaps it does not apply anymore; but learning to troubleshoot a call across  
an X.75 telnet gateway at DNIC 3106 gave me practical experience.

Historical references in a nutshell; even in today's coursework IMO are still 
relevant.

./Randy



- Original Message -
From: Miles Fidelman 
To:
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" 
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 4:21 PM
Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated

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  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 ranti

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Miles Fidelman]

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 
mailto:mfidel...@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
mailto: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

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Grant Ridder]

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 
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 
>> 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
>
>

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Miles Fidelman]

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  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

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Mike Jones]

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  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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Måns Nilsson]

Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated Date: Wed, Dec 24, 
2014 at 11:40:48AM -0500 Quoting Scott Morris (s...@emanon.com):
 
> Now, as a side, one problem that I often have with various academic-based
> courses is that the people who teach them often don¹t have enough
> real-world experience (or not current anyway) in order to pass along any
> benefit in that matter.  There are many things that need to be addressed
> at this level within the higher-education arena, and I¹m sure it¹s not
> just related to networking subjects!

When I did teaching, it was as an employee hired to do network ops
first and academic stuff a definite second. I'm still not qualified
to even apply to the courses I taught, but I did get nice evaluations;
simply because what we taught was very connected to the NREN we ran. Thus
we could pick examples from Actual Reality and make the binary -> hex
conversions relevant. 

I'm thinking that network operations and design today is a field much
like workshop toolroom knowledge was back before CAD/CAM; there is a
solid and long scientific backing to what is done, in materials science,
maths, etc; the machines used are products from elevated precision
and experience centres, but still, you can't get them to do anything
useful without a well balanced theoretical background coupled to solid
hands-on experience. The rookie and the engineer from the construction
dept. will both need training to be useful and non-lethal in that
environment, even if the engineer can design a successful lathe. 

The rôle of network courses in academia, then, is a lot like looking out
for the programmer with the soldering iron. People who know how things
ought to work in theory are quite likely to be dangerous in practice. (and
don't get me started on studio sound engineers in live sound...)

It might be though, that I've simply been watching Keith Fenner on
Youtube too many late nights. (That is a recommendation, btw.)
-- 
Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina
MN-1334-RIPE +46 705 989668
Uh-oh!!  I forgot to submit to COMPULSORY URINALYSIS!


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Louis]

As a student I feel particularly concerned about this.

Le 22/12/2014 10:13, Javier J a écrit :
> 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?

On the point about learning "ancient" technologies like X.25, I strongly
believe it's not useless when put in comparison with newer ones .
The purpose of some protocols depends on their environment at a specific
time. IMHO, the evolution that resulted SPDY shows how TCP *was*
relevant when you had lots of noise on the line (back-off algorithms).
Furthermore, getting to know the past is the best way to avoid
perpetrating the same mistakes all over. Eventually providing bases and
theory of a simple communication (channeling, OSI model,
error-correction, etc.).

The administration's opinion is not to get hands on the latest
technology (mostly pushed by companies) since it can be valueless tomorrow.

On the other hand, people have to be very careful not keeping the rusty
engine working.
I never knew if one of my teacher was aware of the existence of CIDR
notation, meanwhile he taught us about IPv6 (sadly not as a turning
point with IPv4 exhaustion but more like a fancy feature).
On other courses, it ended with VxLAN, LTE and multicast.
I agree that SDN is becoming inevitable and is showing the tip of its nose.

In my experience, I've never waited courses to understand DNS or BGP
(yet they gave me strong roots thereafter).
I'm also one of the few to attend networking conferences. I get a glance
at a more political than technical view of what will be the future
Internet, not taught in class.
I believe lots students aren't aware of theses events, of the resources,
and would be very interested : they just need a little boost.
Some others, as anywhere, won't be very implicated going deeper than the
courses. So, even if they had the latest knowledge, I don't think it
would be so much more beneficial.

In lab we get the opportunity to configure on high-end material.
Our subjects are sometimes very restrictive, not helping to see past the
few commands, not involving "creative" things like seeing everyone a an
independent network, routing through some...
One of my disappointments is we only work on a unique brand. I don't
think we should go over a cheaper manufacturer (removing a somewhat
"precious" experience on the famous one) but we should be given
alternatives, the equivalent of pseudo-code : the router is only a mean
to achieve : how does a Linux construct the BGP command comparing to
Cisco...

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Scott Morris]

All networking courses SHOULD have some version of binary in them.  Too
many things rely on it to be skipped.  Yes, in the real world we have
shortcuts.  But when those shortcuts become the only thing everyone knows,
bad things may be left to happen.  Besides, if one can¹t do binary, how
can they be expected to understand hex?

AnywayŠ  Good these things are here, but one thing I will point out is
that there is a distinct difference with people glazing over because they
don¹t understand something versus the fact that something is truly boring.
 There¹s nothing sexy about binary.  But that doesn¹t mean it can¹t be fun!

So if the classes are Death by Powerpoint (which is very typical in
academia it seems), then I can certainly understand the aversion that
students would have to that.

Amazingly enough, for a skill that everyone SHOULD understand, I find a
tremendous number of people who don¹t.  And for something that¹s boring
and nobody wants to learn, I have LOTS of people sign up for various
sessions I do at certain vendor¹s trade shows on that very subject.  So
someplace there¹s a disparity in there.

Now, as a side, one problem that I often have with various academic-based
courses is that the people who teach them often don¹t have enough
real-world experience (or not current anyway) in order to pass along any
benefit in that matter.  There are many things that need to be addressed
at this level within the higher-education arena, and I¹m sure it¹s not
just related to networking subjects!

Scott

-Original Message-
From: Dennis Bohn 
Date: Tuesday, December 23, 2014 at 2:40 PM
To: Ken Chase 
Cc: 
Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated

>On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Ken Chase  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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Jean-Francois Mezei]

On 14-12-22 04:13, Javier J wrote:

> 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


My first reaction: teacher is former telco/bell labs/lucent worker and
thus his own experience slanted with the old tech telcos were swayed to
by telco vendors to make them incompatible with the new competition
called Cisco (back then).

RE: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Phil Bedard]

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" 
Sent: ‎12/‎23/‎2014 10:40 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 
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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Scott Voll]

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  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" 
> To: "Javier J" 
> 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 
> 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 

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Edward Lewis]

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  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....

[Mike Hammett]

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"  
To: "Javier J"  
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  
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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Matt Karney]

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 
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 
> e

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Dennis Bohn]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Ken Chase  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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Kinkaid, Kyle]

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 
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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:31:52 -0500, Ken Chase said:

> Why is CIDR such an important coursework component? Or is it just a shibboleth

It's partially like a brown M&M backstage at a Van Halen concert - if their
coursework was so pitifully out of date it wasn't covered, you better start
wondering what *else* is lacking.


pgpBNS8NqKIP8.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Ken Chase]

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.

Why is CIDR such an important coursework component? Or is it just a shibboleth
to filter out people who cant do simple gradeschool math in their heads or
just memorize the subnets (there's only 7.. I've only used supernets twice in
the last 10 years..) (I admit I slow down a little when I do wildcard
netmasks, but other than that.. ?)

I heard tales of kids (ie under 25) learning partial differential equations in
university or college as well (which I myself had trouble with but eventually
got, at least long enough to write the exam!) so why is the
mathematics/symbolics manipulation bar set so low in modern courses in any
sci/tech stream?

/kc


On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 01:22:45PM -0500, Sadiq Saif said:
  >On 12/22/2014 11:11, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
  >> Did the standard packaged Cisco curriculum finally drop mention of
  >> "Class A/B/C" and go CIDR?
  >
  >For the most part yes. They still reference it for historical purposes
  >but otherwise it is all VLSM/CIDR.
  >
  >-- 
  >Sadiq Saif

-- 
Ken Chase - k...@heavycomputing.ca skype:kenchase23 +1 416 897 6284 Toronto 
Canada
Heavy Computing - Clued bandwidth, colocation and managed linux VPS @151 Front 
St. W.

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Sadiq Saif]

On 12/22/2014 11:11, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
> Did the standard packaged Cisco curriculum finally drop mention of
> "Class A/B/C" and go CIDR?

For the most part yes. They still reference it for historical purposes
but otherwise it is all VLSM/CIDR.

-- 
Sadiq Saif

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Florian Weimer]

* Valdis Kletnieks:

> On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:13:42 -0500, Javier J said:
>
>> student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
>> CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?
>
> Did the standard packaged Cisco curriculum finally drop mention of
> "Class A/B/C" and go CIDR?

Has the output format been changed so that you do not know about
address classes anymore?

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Christopher Morrow]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Javier J  wrote:

> 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

These sound like 'standard enterprise networking technologies' (still,
yes some other options are coming around, but .. there's still a
shed-load of atm/frame wan stuff to be bought, and really the 'mpls'
for enterprises is gussied up frame/atm without per-site ptp link
management at each site, no knowledge of MPLS is required on the
enterprise side of the connection)

> 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?

enterprise people hide in 10/8  ... why would they need to care about
/26 or 27 ? everythign in their world is a /24.

> 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.

but, the cross-over cable means my network gear still works and I
don't have to spend on replacement gear (yet). Remember, enterprise
network.

> 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.

you must require a large cooling vat then.

> Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

enterprise networking... the name of the degree says enough to know
what's going to come out of the program :(

> 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?

you are getting a bit ranty, if you keep in mind the target of the
coursework (enterprise people) then basically nothing in your mail is
shocking.

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:13:42 -0500, Javier J said:

> student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
> CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?

Did the standard packaged Cisco curriculum finally drop mention of
"Class A/B/C" and go CIDR?


pgpspyRKWIcKF.pgp
Description: PGP signature

RE: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Shaw, Matthew]

Thankfully only about 30 minutes north of SNHU is my alma mater, the New 
Hampshire Technical Institute, a technical school which is fairly well known 
(locally at least) for its nursing, electrical engineering, and IT programs. 
The school's invested in a modern lab with a dozen or so equipment pods and 
borrows elements from the Cisco Net Academy program as well. They offer CCNP 
related courses every few years dependent on interest and just last year 
started a VMWare VCP program. We did touch on those old technologies, which to 
some degree do still exist in the area, but also covered all the good stuff too.

I'm under the impression SNHU has a couple programs it's good at, but to Mr. 
Herrin's point IT isn't one of them. It's fairly common to see IT folks around 
here go to NHTI for skills and an AS, and then SNHU or others to fill in the 
checkboxes for a semi related BS. The alternative is typically a more expensive 
school in and around Boston.

As far as the larger issue is concerned Javier, I believe it's a cultural 
problem where we're still encouraging our high school graduates to attend 4 
year programs no matter what.  The demand is still incredibly high (as is the 
resulting price!) for even not so great programs like the one in question. 
Unfortunately if potential attendees don't do their research to find out how 
graduates of the programs they're considering are doing in the real world, 
they'll end up like this.

Matthew Shaw

-Original Message-
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org] On Behalf Of William Herrin
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2014 6:54 AM
To: Javier J
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: How our young colleagues are being educated

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Javier J  wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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?

SNHU offers -online- bachelor's and master's degrees in such well known 
programs as "IT Management" and "Information Security." You can even pick 
whether you want a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science.

It's a -degree mill-. What level of quality did you expect in the coursework?

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us Owner, 
Dirtside Systems . Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/> May I solve your 
unusual networking challenges?

___


This e-mail message and its attachments are for the sole use of the intended 
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Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[William Herrin]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Javier J  wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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?

SNHU offers -online- bachelor's and master's degrees in such well
known programs as "IT Management" and "Information Security." You can
even pick whether you want a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of
Science.

It's a -degree mill-. What level of quality did you expect in the coursework?

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems . Web: 
May I solve your unusual networking challenges?

Re: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Daniël W . Crompton]

*shameless plug*

Usually not a topic for this list, and together with two co-founders we
started an online university last to address some of the issues we saw with
higher education. We currently have approval from the state of Vermont to
give college credit, credits earned through Oplerno courses are
transferable to other institutions of higher learning at the discretion of
the receiving institution.

If you think that this subject should be addressed at a college level and
are interested in teaching it you are welcome to apply as a faculty member
to teach an improved course.

Kindest regards,
Daniël



Oplerno is built upon empowering faculty and students

-- 
Daniël W. Crompton 




http://specialbrands.net/

    
 


On 22 December 2014 at 10:13, Javier J  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: How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Måns Nilsson]

Subject: How our young colleagues are being educated Date: Mon, Dec 22, 
2014 at 04:13:42AM -0500 Quoting Javier J (jav...@advancedmachines.us):
> Dear NANOG Members,
> 
> It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
> America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.

Yes. Although, as long as they don't teach people that _every_ router
does NAT, we'll be fine.
 
> Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

At the university I taught, yes.  But that is in Europe, on the Royal
Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, for 3rd year in a MsC
programme in EE, Physics or CS. I am seeing similar cluelessness at
smaller proto-universities in Sweden, where they have bought a branded
course. Lots of Flame Delay. And EIGRP. Branded course. Our trainee that
came out of that did prove to be highly trainable, though.
 
> 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.

Multicast, check. 
DNS, check. 

> 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?

People who enter academentia in networking, especially to teach at
rural colleges, tend to freeze in time and stick to whatever fad was
"in" when they were young. Especially ATM is popular, since it has,
for all its uselessness, a nice theoretical undercarriage and stands
on the shoulders of decades of telco style "Warum einfach wenns auch
kompliziert geht?" (you will have to translate that yourself, it's German
and describes engineering well)

In Sweden, universities (where tuition is 0 for all citizens and can be
made 0 for all citizens of the EU) the universities have a third task
besides undergraduate production and research, and that is to interact
with greater society. The key to good education that fulfils the needs
of society is to ensure the interaction is two-way. Each course, get a 
industry lecturer in for at least one lecture. This, if chosen well, will
make it impossible to teach Flame Delay in 2014. 

-- 
Måns Nilsson primary/secondary/besserwisser/machina
MN-1334-RIPE +46 705 989668
We have DIFFERENT amounts of HAIR --


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How our young colleagues are being educated....

[Javier J]

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?