News
[22 February] The first lab will start on the "PQ" stream of week 1 (i.e. Wednesday onwards).
In this year, all internal assessment marks (i.e. lab marks) are accessible via Blackboard.
[21 February] David will join us as the lecturer, and Kai-Cheung will be the teaching assistant of this paper.
This paper will be useful to anyone wanting to develop some skills in the management of Small Or Home Office (SOHO) networks, and as such introduces you to skills that are very good for any person to have who wants to work with IT, including programmers.
This is a highly practical paper, involving hands-on labs covering skills such as building a network cable and wireless networking.
This paper has been popular with some students who feel they want to persue a career where programming is not a dominant skill. Beware however, that the labs can require plenty of work, depending on how familiar you are with the environment.
We use Linux and Ethernet as continuing examples throughout the paper, and touch on other systems as needed.
At the conclusion of the paper, you should have amassed sufficient knowledge to begin studying for a basic certification, or to build your own home network, which is a recommended activity throughout and after the paper. The following diagram shows a skill-tree (you might be familiar with the concept from numerous computer games) of the content of this paper, in order to show how the particular topics fit together.
Textbook
The text-book is the laboratory handbook you will be given. It is important that you try to read the labnotes before coming to do the lab. You will find this text-book to be very comprehensive, and very useful after the course.
Lectures & Labs
Lectures are held on Monday 11am in St David Seminar Room 4, and Thursday 11am in St David Seminar Room 3
Some of the labs are quite long, with a lot of reading material. If you do not read before the lab, you will fall behind.
Labs are held in Lab E in the Owheo Building. There are two lab-streams. All students must attend one of the “PP” streams, and one of the “PQ” streams, although exceptions can be made for students with timetable clashes.
- First lab
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Either PP1: Monday 12–1:50pm or PP2: Monday 2–3:50pm
- Second lab
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Either PQ1: Wednesday 4–5:50pm or PQ2: Thursday 1–2:50pm
Contact
Lecturers
| Zhiyi | hzy@cs.otago.ac.nz | |
| Office | Room 126, Owheo Building | |
| Phone | x5680 (479 5680) | |
| David | dme@cs.otago.ac.nz | |
| Office | Room 107C, Owheo Building | |
| Phone | x5749 (479 5749) |
Teaching assistant
| Kai-Cheung | kcleung@cs.otago.ac.nz | |
| Office | Room 255, Owheo Building | |
| Phone | x7852 (479 7852) |
Class Representatives
We need at least one class representative, preferably at least two. Please give some thought to serving your class in this capacity. We really do want to receive useful feedback on how the paper progresses.
Labbook ePub
Looking towards the future, we think that all text-books should be available as ePub text-books, so we can more easily update it year after year, and you don’t have to carry around big heavy text-books. All we need is a nice E-book reader that makes it easy to take notes and doesn’t cost more than a couple of text-books. If you want, you can try the ePub version of the labbook. However, it is a work in it's early stages. Note that a lot of ePub readers strip the CSS; some more than others. Readers that maintain the layout include Apple’s iBook (on iOS devices). More will be tested later.