LEADING THE LAB SESSION

Hi Everyone!

I am writing this blog to share with you all my experience of leading the lab session.

I and my friend Shruti Kapur decided to lead the lab session 10 on 28th oct 2010,in which we were supposed to teach our group members the following things-

• Setting a machine as web server and creating a basic webpage
• Snoop data on the network
• Setting up P2P in a LAN (messages and file transfer)

All the lab leaders assembled in the SM lab on the previous saturday(i.e. 23rd oct) for the training session.There were a few glitches in between as most of us had not brought our laptops along(we were not informed!) and since we did not have the 'admin' password,we could not download the softwares from internet.

Moreover,it became quite difficult to concentrate at the end as we had been working continuosly for 4 hours without a break! ;-) But overall the training session went quite well.

Finally thursday arrived and we spent the whole morning,trying out all the steps once again in order to prepare ourselves well enough for the lab.I was a little bit nervous as i was not sure if i would be able to clear everyone's doubts.Once the lab started,I explained everyone what we were going to cover in the lab.

Everyone was most interested in creating websites which they created using Joomla and Wordpress.Everything went off quite smoothly thanks to the the co-operation of our group members.

Overall the experience was quite fun and enjoyable.It also made me realise how much effort our teachers put in for preparing our lectures as we spent more than 6-7 hours to prepare for a 2 hour lab session.I thank Amarjeet Sir for providing us with such an amazing oppurtunity.

Working On The Project Presentation

It has been ,undoubtedly, a great experience working on the S.M Project.I along with Tanya and Abhimanyu worked on Geotagging ,which is a pretty creative way to display photos and videos at a particular location on maps or using Google Earth.

Thanks to Amarjeet sir for providing us with such an opportunity to learn and work on such interesting application.I still remember when we were thinking on what topic to take up and Tanya suggested this topic.From then on we started working over it.Initially geotagging using Picasa was not a problem but it was using GPS to geotag that was our challenge as despite enabling the GPS the geotagging option in the cellphone failed to work.Fortunately ,we could arrange for a cellphone with GPS enabled...and it worked great...thanks to Tanya :) After that, things went on smoothly(that is if the busy schedule of various other assignments and quizes are excluded. :-)).We could then work on various other techniques to geotag using the GPS.

In short, a great experience.

Devika (10028)

Tanya(10090)

Abhimanyu Khanna(10001)

Group Project - Secure Communication over Internet

Hi everyone!

Through this post I(Ankit), Nikhil and Vikas would like to mention our experience at working for our project and its presentation.

First of all, I should not forget to thank our instructor Dr. Amarjeet for providing us with an opportunity to work upon something new and practical.

The aim of our project was to find ways of sharing information and data over networks such that the transfer is encrypted and the files are not accessible to any third party. We studied about different secure protocols such as https, ipsec, ssl, tls, ssh.

Networking via https is not at the choice of the user but can be done if the webserver has obtained a certificate for it and also either the browser should be pre installed with the certificate or else it can be installed later on.
For communicating via ssl/tls, the first condition is that the server should enable ssl and secondly the client also needs to obtain a server certificate. We could not demonstrate that because for this we were required to set up our own server.
Ssh uses public-key cryptography for authentification. The general method is that the client machine generates a key with private and public copy. The private copy is accessible only to the machine itself and the public key is sent to the machine with which the connection is to be established. Then any types of file transfer can take place between the machines.
Here is a good ssh tutorial - http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux .
Since ftp protocol was not a secure protocol, so sftp(secure ftp) was developed to overcome the shortcomings of ftp. It also utilizes the ssh encryption. Can be used both in windows as well as linux.

We could not find many utilities related to this topic but hope that the presentation and this post have been informative enough.
Also we should be thanking our IIIT-D server room administrators for their guidance and for giving us access to the servers.

Ankit (2010015)
Vikas (2010095)
Nikhil (2010054)

Leading the Lab Session

10 lab sessions passed and then we grabbed the chance to lead the 11th lab session. But we were disappointed to see very less students turning up for the lab and then leaving too early ('coz they have much more important work to do). We were to cover :

1.Video Editing (Which every one supposed they knew)

2.Photo Editing

3.SVN server

4.Remote Connection between computers.

Students were much interested in SVN servers and Remote connections. Nobody cared for Photo Editing/Video Editing. Overall it was good experience learning these things during training session on Saturday but equally bad were we in imparting the knowledge of the subject and we are not going to take blame for this.

Above all we are very thanks full to Dr. Amarjeet Singh Sir for providing us this opportunity.

Apoorv saini

2010020

Abhishek Gupta

2010004

Being A Leader

I along with Sahil Jain lead the lab on the topics Security in wireless routers, comparison of 802.11 a/b/g/n and configuring a wireless router.
The training session on saturday was a very bad experience. We came on time but as usual the lab leaders started late. Some of the topics like anti-virus had no content for the lab session. Even firewall was covered very vaguely.
But the lab hand-out was pretty well prepared and we could manage through.

The most interesting topic was WEP cracking. Everyone in the lab also enjoyed learning it. Another problem that came up during the lab hours was the inconvenience with the wireless router that did not work but thanks to our TA Arjun who came up with a solution and brought a wireless device. With the help of this device we were able to show WEP cracking and complete our lab successfully.

It was a very healthy experience and we look forward to lead such lab sessions again.

Sumit Aggarwal
(2009046)

Sahil Jain
(2010071)

Project--LaTeX...

first of all we would like to thank Amarjeet Sir for this project...as it made us learn something new...and learned to struggle and look out for information from other sources..and also thank the TA's for this as the initiation of this project was actually because of them giving us the relevant information about the project...

so when we firstly got to know about the software used to do the codings to make it a pdf document...we were shocked to see the number of commands in this project and looked like a full programming language...but then we asked TA's about this and fortunately they knew a lot about it...so we got an initial kickstart in the project...as we got a 30-40 page tutorial about LaTeX from them..

slowly and gradually we started to code some small programs...that took 10 lines coding even for a single page document...

we had options of using two softwares--TeXnicentre and MiKtex...but we eventually decided to carry on with MiKTeX as we found that easy to use than TeXnicentre....

we came along new things like using the mathematical formulas like the integrals and limits...summations..which we found interesting...but we looked for something like page designing like inserting bullets and include pics...
and eventually we got that also in the end...

we also faced many challenges as the content was huge and we had to decide a lot on what topics to include in the presentation....although that did not go well in the presentation as it took a lot of time...
secondly,all of us were at different places during the break..so only the facebook connection was there to communicate...
but in the end it was a nice experience learning new things and that too learning it all by yourself makes you feel really good....

AKSHAY RAJVANSHI
(2010011)
SAURABH YADAV
(2010077)
DEEPANKER AGGARWAL
(2010027)

doubt about RAM ...

hello guys,
                we often come with this confusion about the frequency of the RAM we use...suppose we want to add more RAM to our system...so if the RAM we are thinking to purchase is of different frequency than the RAM we already have..then what are the possible consequences...will it affect the computer in any way..in terms of speed if it works???