Internet Activities

This week's module involved Internet History, and familiarizing ourselves with some basic internet terminology. In the first exercise I located the IP address of the computer I use. It is my laptop, IP address 128.196.107.20. This search reminded me of registering my computer for campus access. To register the computer one needs to locate the MAC address which is different than the IP address. From what I understand, the MAC address is the physical address of the adapter you are using. I imagine that this is useful for internet security here on campus, because once you have the MAC address you must go through student link and officially register the address with the University. As a employee at the university library's reference desk, I try to use the term adapter address. The term MAC confuses everyone, as it is the most popular term for Apple's Macintosh computers!

The second part of this exercise was to find out where the IP address 66.253.148.213 was located. Using ARIN WHOIS, two entries came up that conatined the IP address in their ranges. One was Distributed Management Information Systems, Inc., located in Illinois. The more interesting entry is Royal Entrada Real Oeste Apartments on University. More interesting because that address is right up the street from me, which somehow makes the address more tangible.

The tracert activity was actually very frustrating for me, at first.
No matter how many times I tried, when I ran the command prompt program the hops always 'request timed out'. At 30 hops, I had hoped for more of a response than that. I wondered if it was my computer. In class I tried it on the lab computer, and it immediately came up with several IP addresses. I did not write any of those down, however, so I was unable to look them up on the ARIN database. However, today I finally recieved one IP address in response to my tracert! I used the tracert command to trace arizona.edu, instead of www.arizona.edu. I'm not sure why that worked instead. The IP address came up as 128.196.128.233 which, when searched through ARIN, appears to be the UA main address. This result was different from the Royal Entrada Apartments IP address search. Thre was no range of addresses. The following is from the result:

NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: ARIZONA.EDU
NameServer: NS-REMOTE.ARIZONA.EDU
NameServer: CS.ARIZONA.EDU
NameServer: PENDRAGON.CS.PURDUE.EDU

The term Direct Assignment I am interpreting as a direct connection to the server, rather than bouncing around, perhaps the connection I have goes directly to a central server? The fourth server is interesting, too. I wonder why Purdue is listed? Does UA use Purdue's servers? Cool name for the server, BTW. I wonder if there is an Arthur and Merlin server out there...

I had heard of a few network commands before, like ipconfig, ping and finger most recently. Ipconfig I used, as described before, to find my computer's IP address and MAC address. Ping we talked about in class, and I had heard the term 'pinging' other people's computers. The finger command I just recently learned about when reading about the internet and coke machines in activity 6. I put two and two together to figure out that the addresses they listed were to be 'fingered' in command prompt. I actually got a response from one by typing in the command: finger drink@drink.csh.rit.edu. The response I got was, "Welcome to the CSH drink server/ Drink User info on Drink/ Balance: 0". I can't believe they've got these machines hooked up to the internet. Laziness is the mother of invention this time.

The only netiquette violation I have ever seen is via email. My mom was just learning how to compose emails, and she sent everything in CAPS for awhile. I didn't realize how much it seemed like shouting until I got those emails from her. She is much more considerate these days ;-)