Lab Exercises - CSCI 558L, Fall 2010

Lab Exercises - CSCI 558L, Fall 2010

This class will involve three substantial exercises. Each student will do the exercise individually. For most of the exercises, you will need more than one machine. For each exercise, you will have two or three weeks do complete it. Please make sure you have read the lab rules.

Please do not work with another student. When it is your lab time in SAL 224, you should be the only person sitting in front of a set of lab setup.

To be fair to all, the following rule will be enforced. If the TA or the instructor walked into the lab and found two students sitting at the same lab setup, both students will receive a score of zero for the lab exercise and the remaining timeslots of these students will be freed up.

If you are just chatting with another student, please do it outside of the lab because the above rule will be enforced.

Timeslot Assignments

Timeslot assignments will be done through lotteries.

for exercise 1 - 6 timeslots per student over 3 weeks
for exercise 2 - 4 timeslots per student over 2 weeks
for exercise 3 - 6 timeslots per student over 3 weeks

After the lotteries are enabled, you can enter a string for each lottery. (If you do not enter anything, your login ID will be your entry into the lottery.) You will also need to assign priorities for the available timeslots.

The lottery will order the students into a list, based on a secret string which will be disclosed when the lottery is run. Students are then assigned timeslots in a round-robin fashion according to the lottery result and the priorities specified by the students.

How to sign up for timeslots will be announced during the first lecture. After the lotteries are over, you should check the schedules using the links above and decide if you would like to make changes. Change requests should be sent to the TA via e-mails. In order to be fair, requests to move timeslots must be done at least 24 hours in advance (from the beginning of both the "from" and the "to" timeslots). Please also note the following:

If you plan to go for a free timeslot, please check the above schedule before you go. It is possible that it may have been assigned since the last time you looked.
If you want to swap a lab exercise timeslot with another student and both of you have agreed, you do not need to ask the TA to change the scheduling information on the web because we do not monitor who is there at what time, provided that both students remain registered in class.

Lab Exercises

(Please note that access to the exercises is restricted.)

Please note that the only allowed file formats are Text, PDF, Postscript, and HTML. Please name your submission as either ex#.txt, ex#.pdf, ex#.ps, or ex#.html, respectively (where # is the exercise number).

Exercise 1: Intra-domain Route Oscillations, due 11:45PM, 10/2/2010. Electronic submissions only.
Exercise 2: Blackholing, Sinkholing and Traceback, due 11:45PM, 10/17/2010. Electronic submissions only.
Exercise 3: Isolation and Service Differentiation for TCP Traffic, due 11:45PM, 11/8/2010. Electronic submissions only.

Grading

We will assign letter grades to your submissions. The conversion from a letter grade to a numeric score (for lab exercises) is done according to the following table:

Grade Points
A 50
A- 44
B+ 36
B 30
B- 24
C+ 16
C 10
C- 4
F 0

[BC: paragraph added 9/23/2010]
Please note that this letter grade has nothing to do with the overall letter grade you will receive for the class. When the final grade is calculated, only the numeric value of your score will be used.

Late Submission

Please try your best to submit on time. Late submissions will receive severe penalties. Due to clock skews, electronic submissions of projects and lab exercises assignments will be accepted within 15 minutes after the specified deadlines without penalties. If you submit with the next 24 hours, you will receive 75% of your grade. Although in the first 50 minutes of this period, you will only lose 1% of your grade every 2 minutes. After the first 24 hours, you will again lose 1% of your grade every 2 minutes for the next 150 minutes. You will receive a score of zero afterwards (and your assignment will not be graded).

Notes

Start early: Each exercise is fairly involved. Do not underestimate the time it will take to perform the exercise.
Slots: We will set up a schedule in the lab, to ensure that you have exclusive access, for certain periods of time, to machines that you will need. Each week, you will have two reserved 4-hour slots.
Preparation: Prepare thoroughly before going into the lab to do your exercise. Read the relevant material before hand, and plan carefully what you want to do during the lab session.
Scripting: Write perl or shell scripts to automate as many of the tasks as you can. This is useful because you may need to do the experiment many times.