ICT Terminology Mistakes, Office LAN, Fibre-Optic Cabling, Switching Table, IPv4, IPv6, Multitasking - Essay.

What terminology mistakes has the user made? What terminology should they have used?

An office LAN has twenty workstations. The office manager has asked you to replace their 100Mbps (wired) hub with a 100Mbps wireless AP. Will this increase or decrease the bandwidth available to each workstation?

What are two benefits of fibre-optic cabling over wireless networks?

When you turn on a computer, it “knows” its MAC address. What type of address does it need to receive messages from the Internet and how does it get this address?

Describe how multiple processes can appear to be run simultaneously on a computer.

Office LAN and Bandwidth

My hard drive took ages to boot-up this morning and now my Internethas stopped working and I can’t print anything. Help!

What terminology mistakes has the user made? What terminology should they have used?

The user might have used the hardware in such a way that the hardware got disfragmated i.e. he might have installed it wrong or he does not shut down the device. And the internet might have stopped working because of an error in the .dll and iexplorer.exe files. The user might have set the time of the device wrong which caused internet explorer to stop working. Along with this, he was not able to print any document because he might have been using an outdated driver or he would have updated the operating system of his device but might have not updated the driver.

Hence, the ICT terminologies which were misused are hardware, files, time, driver and software.

Information and Communication technologies allow communication between the applications and the systems and helps in connecting the people.ICT has been widely used in the mobile sector as well as the internet sphere. There are many terminologies of ICT starting from a device, drive to a software. ICT includes internet, mobiles, softwares and many other components and is a growing technology in today’s era. This is because it makes the communication and usage of devices easy.

An office LAN has twenty workstations. The office manager has asked you to replace their 100Mbps (wired) hub with a 100Mbps wireless AP. Will this increase or decrease the bandwidth available to each workstation? Explain your reasoning.

In both the cases the bandwidth available to each workstation will remain the same.

As the hub will work for all the wired networks and hence the bandwidth will be shared with all the computers which are connected. The wireless parts of a hub are the access points. The access points are used while working for a wireless number of users. The access points will also share the bandwidth with all the connected users. Hence, even if all the workstations are connected and they transmit data through the network then in both the cases the bandwidth will be shared equally by all the workstations (Forouzan, 2007).

Your question: How the ad hoc networks are different from that of the wireless access points?

 Under an ad hoc network, two and more than two networks can be easily connected and there is no need of access points. The ad hoc networks work on the principles of peer to peer communication and are implemented just like the Bluetooth networks. The main disadvantages of wireless ad hoc networks are that they do not have scalability and have traffic congestion. The wireless ad hoc networks are not permanent in nature.

Fibre-Optic Cabling vs Wireless Networks

On the other hand, access points are connected to each other with the help of a LAN. They are permanent in nature and have good management of scalability and traffic congestion.

There are two other LANs at GAMPS office, one for the main office (called ADMIN) and one for the admissions gate (called GATE).  There are 5 workstations on each LAN.  On ADMIN, the workstations connect to a 100Mbps hub.  On GATE, the workstations connect to a 100Mbs switch with all ports operating in half-duplex mode.  If you connected your laptop to GATE, would it be subject to more, the same or less collisions than if it was connected to ADMIN?  You can assume data rates and traffic patterns are the same on each LAN.  Justify your answer by explaining the origin of the collisions.

If I connect my laptop to ADMIN in place of the GATE, then there will be more collisions on the network. As collisions occur mostly in the setups which uses hubs. But no collision occurs in a half-duplex mode of a switch. Apart from this, it has also been observed that at times switch increases the collision domain but it is good for the system. This can be explained with an example that if a switch which has 5 ports will have 5 collision domains i.e. each and every port will have individual domain. On the contrary, if a hub has 5 ports then there will be only one collision domain which will be shared by all the ports (Xiao, 2011).

Compare and contrast the difference between switch and a hub.

Hub is an electronic device which helps in connecting many different types of network devices together to create a medium of exchanging data between the devices. The hub has a half-duplex transmission mode with a speed of 10Mbps. The devices are passive devices, and the hubs are determined at the physical layer of the OSI model.

On the other hand, a switch is a computer networking devices which helps in connecting many devices together on a particular computer network. The switch network has a full-duplex transmission mode consisting of speed upto 1 Gbps. The devices are the active devices and consist of a networking device along with the software. Switch networks are determined at the data link layer of the OSI model

What are two benefits of fibre-optic cabling over wireless networks?

The two benefits of fibre-optic cabling over the wireless networks are:

1. The fibre-optic cabling reduces the interferences of the signals which pass through it and hence the quality of the signal is good. But in wireless networks the signals have interferences and therefore the quality of the signal is bad.
2. As fibre optic cables transfers the data in the form of optical signals and hence the data propagates with the speed of light. While, in wireless networks, the transfer of data is in the form of radio signals which has slow speed. Therefore, the speed provided by fibre optic is higher than the speed of wireless networks(Stallings, 2006).

Switching Table Operations

What are the security issues in wireless networks along with the solutions?

The security issues in wireless networking is as follows,

1. As wireless networking uses access points, these access points are used by more than one user at a particular time. Therefore there are high chances of attackers attacking the resources because it is very difficult to monitor and analyse the network traffic of wireless networks. However, this problem can be solved if strong authentication is implemented on the network.
2. The packets which are getting transferred from one user to the other is also shared by all the connected users and hence the data is not safe and anyone can use it. This problem can be solved by allocating encryption and cryptographic keys to the packets.

When you turn on a computer, it “knows” its MAC address. What type of address does it need to receive messages from the Internet and how does itget this address?

It is mandatory for each and every computer to have an Internet Protocol address to update and receive data or messages from the internet. MAC address is the physical addresses and is defined for each and every computer. But the IP address is allocated to the computer when it is connected to a network or to the internet. For the public networks, the IP address is set by the Internet Service Provider while the IP address for private network is allocated by the DHCP server or by the administrator of the server. The mapping of IP address into MAC address and vice versa can be easily done with the help of standards. These addresses distinguish different computer devices over the wide range of networks (Robertazzi, 2017).

How an IP address can be used for getting the MAC address of the same computer?

The protocol used for finding the MAC address of the computer from the IP address of the computer is Address Resolution Protocol. This protocol converts the IP address of the computer into the MAC address. If the IP address of the computer is given then the ARP cache can easily find the MAC address. This protocol is implemented on device drivers of the network operating systems and works on the data link layer of the OSI model. ARP works in token ring, ATM and is mostly used in the Ethernet networks.

Explain how it is that IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist on the same networks anddescribe two technologies that enable this.

IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist on the same network because up gradation of the device gets difficult because of the large number networks and nodes. As the administrator has to install new versions for each and every host and router, IPv6 makes use of IPv4 to make this process fast. There are many technologies with the help of which IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist like,

1. Tunnelling- In this technology, one of the IP address is inside the other IP address. The tunnels help in carrying packets of one IP across the WAN and internet of the other. There are two types of tunnelling i.e. static and dynamic. In manual tunnelling, at both the ends of the tunnel configuration should be done. While in dynamic tunnelling, the packets destination address is established and is easy to create and maintain(Loshin, 2004).
2. Dual-IP stacks- The devices are able to run both the protocols simultaneously.  The TCP/IP protocol is stacked on the WAN routers, then the perimeter routers after that is the data-centre router and at last is the desktop access router.

Compare and contrast IPv4 and IPv6.

IPv4 and IPv6 are network layer protocols but the number of bits in IPv4 is 32 bits while the number of bits in IPv6 is 128bits.Thhe IPv6 addresses are always defined in a form of hexadecimal notation while IPv4 addresses are defined in dot-decimal notation.IPv6 allows bigger payloads as compared to IPv4. Along with this, IPv6 has more usable space and also makes the router’s work easy.  Hence, IPv6 has more advantages than IPv4 and is preferred all over the world.

IPv4 and IPv6

Assignment Question:

A switching table has the following entries:

Port 3 is connected to a hub.

During your testing, the following events occur:

1. The entry for 00-25-2A-00-10-FC expires.
2. An addition device (00-25-2A-00-10-00) is connected to the hub on port 3.  
3. A new virtualised machine (00-25-2A-AA-10-0C) is started on the server connected to port 2
4. Device (00-25-2A-00-10-00) is disconnected from the hub on port 3 and connected to port 5. 

Draw the switching table that you’d expect to see at the end of these events.  The order of entries is unimportant:

Your answer:

Is it possible that one MAC address has multiple IP address? How?

Yes, it is possible that one MAC address can have multiple IP address combined to it. This is possible when the computer device is connected to more than one network. The servers also allocate more than one IP address on the same MAC address.Hence, the MAC address of the computer remains the same but two IP address gets assigned to it.

The services provided to each network have different IP address and hence the server can easily distinguish between different services. The service is easily transmitted from one server to other and there is no need to change the IP address. This provides abstraction of data and scalability (Loshin, 2004).

Describe how multiple processes can appear to be run simultaneously on a computer.

A technique known as multitasking technique helps an operating system to run multiple processes simultaneously on a computer.The two multitasking techniques are context switching and time-slicing. In context switching, the control changes from one process to other depending on the priority of the process. And, in time-slicing the time cycles of the CPU is shared within the multiple processes which are running at the same time. This helps in utilizing the CPU to its maximum limit. Along with this, pre-emptive and co-operative techniques are also used. In co-operative technique the process runs until and unless the task is not completed. While, in pre-emptive techniques the CPU is controlled i.e. which process will share the CPU and for how long (Forouzan, 2007).

How multiprocessing is different from multiprogramming?

Multiprogramming is when more than one program is getting run on the same computer and with a single processor. The CPU is shared with the all the programs running simultaneously. In multiprogramming, at a time many programs are stored in the memory. Multiprogramming is same as multi-tasking because the time is shared in both of them among the processes and the programs.

While, in multiprocessing the execution of more than one processes at the same time takes place and on the same hardware resource. Multiprocessing can also be done by adding more external hardware resources into the device.

Multitasking on a Computer

You have a 32GB USB stick. You are going to store an 8GB database file on the drive. The database file contains sensitive information. What file system should you format the drive with? Why?

The file system which will be used to format the drive while storing 8GB database file on 32GB USB stick is New Technology File System. This file system is chosen because,

• This file system contains volume mount points which restrict a driver from accessing the volume as there is no use of the volume.
• It provides encryption of files and hence the data is secure and it is difficult for an unauthorized user to use the data.
• The data which can be occupied in the file is limitless.
• The compression of the storage media is easily done.
• If files are deleted mistakenly, then they can easily be restored by this file system.

As, the database file contains sensitive information therefore NFTS will encrypt the file and in case of deletion will easily restore it back (Ciampa, 2017).

What is Resilient File System?

Resilient File System is a file system launched by Microsoft. There are many disadvantages of NTFS like data storage and design. ReFS are an advanced version of NFTS. The new features included in ReFS are data integrity check, preservation from data degradation, redundancy and data scrubbing.  The main feature of this file system is that it has a self-repairing property. Along with this, it handles hard drive failure automatically and provides pooling along with virtualisation of storage.

Few of the features not in ReFS are compression, transaction, disk quota, etc. The most current version of windows in which ReFS is used is windows 12 operating system.

Firewalls can be effective against worms, but are generally of no use for viruses. Why is this? You may need to do some additional research to answer this.

Firewalls are responsible for checking the incoming and outgoing packets of the network. They are basically hardware of software. The firewall consists of many rules which are defined by different protocols for example, the application level protocol, the IP protocol.

The firewall prevents worms coming to the network by filtering the traffic of the network. Viruses do not come from the network; they can easily enter into the system by the storage devices or by the attachment files. For example, devices like USB or hard drive can spread the virus in the system even if the system is protected by the firewall (Forouzan, 2007).

What is the difference between Intrusion Detection System and a Firewall?

Intrusion Detection Systems are used for monitoring the network traffic. It finds and examines the unusual activities and sends alerts to the system. It is a proactive system. These systems make use of anomaly detection techniques which compares the packet sizes and activities. Along with this, another technique known as signature detection techniques makes use of the database and stores the network traffic data and the attacked data.

But firewalls restrict the traffic on the network by accepting and rejecting the data with the help of the set of rules. It also checks the packets before accepting and sending it on the network and checks the ports of the system which accepts the connection to the network

References

Ciampa, M. (2017). CompTIA security+ guide to network security fundamentals. USA: Cengage Learning.

Forouzan, B. and Fegan, S. (2007). Data communications and networking. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Loshin, P. (2004). IPv6. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Robertazzi, T. (2017). Introduction to Computer Networking. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Stallings, W. (2006). Cryptography and network security. USAi: Pearson Education.

Xiao, Y., Shen, X. and Du, D. (2011). Wireless network security. New York: Springer.