CS 6998-03: Homework 1

1. What is the delay-bandwidth product of a 2.4 Gb/s fiber optic cable from New York to Detroit? Hint: try http://www.indo.com/cgi-bin/dist
2. Given the growth curves for hosts in the domain name service (DNS) shown in class on the slide "Internet Hosts 1989-1997", extrapolate and estimate when every person in the world will have an Internet host. See trends in human population and the data used for the graphs. You may do this graphically.
3. "We don't know how big networks are going to be, so we just give out blocks of 256 IP addresses first-come, first-served, as you need them." What's the advantage of this approach? Disadvantage?
4. A router on a university campus serves four networks, where the first network contains IP addresses 128.59.0.x (where x is any number between 1 and 255), the second 128.59.1.x, etc. 128.59.4.0 and higher may be assigned to some other institution. The router "advertises" to the outside world which networks it servers, by providing a network address and a number which indicates the number of bits to consider (mask). What are the network address and mask?
5. Write a TCP client program in C or Java that implements the "whois" service. (Note: not the more advanced rwhois service described in RFC 2167.) Find out from the IANA and IETF web sites (both reachable through the IETF), respectively, what port is used by whois and what RFC describes it. (Be careful: there's also whois++, which is not what you are looking for...)

   Your program takes two arguments: the name of the whois server and the search string and prints the information returned by the server. Servers include ds.internic.net.