I'll be noting progress and also adding occasional related reading/ and corrections on this blog.
If you want to revise anything to warm up for the course, I suggest last year's Computer Networks course should be a quick re-read (e..g on routing )! A fun review of 40+ years of the Internet
This week we'll just make a start on routing.
Please do ask questions - two good ones today were
Q1 -so there's only one BGP for the whole world- yes, to have multiple Inter-domain routing protocols would mean every borader router might have to implement all of them (sort of "polyglot") which isn't impossible, but would be a nightmare of complexity to manage and operationally hard to understand - although these days, maybe we could use AI tools to manage it?
Q2 - isn't source routing a bit like virtual circuits - excellent question - yes&no - see later in MPLS where we see source routing is a way to manage VCs underlying IP potentially, but it can also be dynamic (well, more so than hard virtual circuit setup)
For fun, you might find this discussion on why LLMs aren't much use for networking, mostly interesting - video recording of panel session
Reference requested for Glossary of Terms: from ISOC
Some acronyms come from the 7 layer model of the communications stack including terms like PHY (short for physical, so not really an acronym).
