ITE 221-Chapter 14-Morello-Kerberos

Windows 2000 was one of the first OSs to use Kerberos for authentication and authorization.  Kerberos is named after a three-headed dog in Greek mythology.  There are three heads in the Kerberos security model; The Key Distribution Center (KDC), the authentication service (AS), and the Ticket Granting Service (TGS).  I found a fairly technical primer for Kerberos in Microsoft’s TechNet archive.  When a client first makes a request for resources, three things happen,

1.        There is an exchange with the AS.
2.        There is an exchange with the TGS.
3.        There is an exchange between the client and server.

Kerberos is used for both local and external sources; therefore the Authentication Service and Ticket Granting Service are run separately so that if you are on another domain, you use the TGS in that domain using the TGT, (Ticket to get Ticket) from your domain.  You can see the whole article at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742516.aspx  

ITE 221 Chapter 13 Morello CORBA

There were many new terms and concepts in this chapter.  CORBA was the most interesting to me.  I found the site for Object Management Group (OMG) for short that has a list of FAQs about CORBA.  I thought that was a good starting point.  None of the links in the document work; they all lead back to the same page, however, the graphic header links do work, and can tell you all the different specifications that OMG is responsible for.  I felt that this was a great introduction for how CORBA is used.  There are some graphics that show how CORBA interacts, but this is not a very technical page.  They do have the option to see more technical details of CORBA buried in the graphic header links.  (I did email them to let them know of the error, so it may be fixed by the time you see this.)  You can see the page at http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/corbafaq.htm/ .

ITE 221 Chapter 12 Morello RAID Array

As anyone who has ever lost a document before they saved it to their computer can tell you, it is very important to have a backup.  Or maybe you have heard the click of death on the only hard drive on your computer.  I found a tutorial on how to build a RAID array, which is invaluable if you make your livelihood on a computer.  The tutorial is eight pages.  The first page is a review of data striping and mirroring. All the rest of the article is the actual instructions for how to build a RAID array. You will need a RAID controller and at the very least, two identical hard drives. My husband actually has a RAID array built into our home network, so I am somewhat familiar with some of the concepts of RAID arrays.  But I was not familiar before this lesson with data striping.  You can find the first page of the tutorial at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/393/

Chapter 11 Morello- Memory addressing and management

Memory management is an important part of any computer system.  As I was doing the research for this blog post, I came across different links for memory management in both android and iphones.  I also came across a link for memory management in a 386 architecture, dated 1989.  This tells me that memory management is vital in computing, and has been for a very long time. I decided to keep it simple. The page I decided to write on comes from stackoverflow.com.  It is a question and answer sequence, like yahoo answers, and it has a couple of different answers to different questions about memory addressing.  I thought it shed some light on some of the concepts, and unwrapped some concepts nicely.  One of the replies mentions the MMU, (Memory Management Unit), which I saw in other places while doing research for the blog post.  You can see the questions and answers at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10185276/memory-addressing-in-assembly-multitasking

ITE 221-Chapter 10 Morello- IDEs

Everyone has their own opinion on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).  I found a comparison of several different IDEs, complete with a comment thread a mile long that is sure to give you a few chuckles.  For the simplest setup, you can set up an IDE from a text editor.  But that is only a side note in the article; there is a separate link in the article telling you how to do that.  The main article was on IDEs that are commercially available. Most IDEs support multiple languages (some don’t do it too well).  There are IDEs for developing for mobile apps, and there are web-based IDEs, where you can send a hyperlink for your code.  Then there are IDEs for specific languages or specific operating systems.  The prices of the IDEs can range from free all the way up to $549 for Visual Studio.  Many of the IDEs are open source.  You can find the link at http://mashable.com/2010/10/06/ide-guide/.

ITE 221-Morello Chapter 9 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet

In doing the homework, I did some “quick research” when it came to the proposed standards for 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet.  I found that the latest standard was adopted June 17, 2010 by the IEEE 802.3 working group.  In 2006 the IEEE 802.3 working group formed the Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) to determine the need for speeds higher than 10 Gigabit Ethernet.  The HSSG determined that high bandwidth content was rapidly outgrowing network capacities. The 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit standard is 802.3ba. The link is to the white papers as listed by brocade.com.  At the end of the white papers, there is mention of what is coming up next; the next generation of 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet.  This standard is to be known as 802.3bg.  The white papers close by saying that no one wants networks to be slower. They want to make 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet more economical and available.  You can view the full white papers at http://www.brocade.com/downloads/documents/white_papers/40_100_GbE_Are_Here_WP.pdf

Chapter 8 Morello Phase Shift Keying

For a long time, I totally did not understand Phase Shift Keying. So I decided to read more about it!  The most helpful site that I found was actually from the Physics department of University of Delaware.  It was a slide from A Brief Introduction to Modem Technology, and it’s by Those Guys. Yes- that is what the credits actually say! The graphics on the slide helped me comprehend what is happening in Phase Shift Keying.  From my understanding of the slide, with Phase Shift Keying, you move from different points in the wave. It has to do with the timing in the wave as opposed to the amplitude or the frequency of the wave.  The whole presentation is there; unfortunately some of the links, such as Acknowledgements are dead.  But overall I found this presentation to be very informative, helpful, and relevant.  You can find the presentation at http://www.physics.udel.edu/~watson/scen103/projects/96s/thosguys/index.html