Request to solve push request

[Murali Krishnan]

Dear All,

  There is a long late communication in the thread.  But I just wanted one request:

  There is a push request from one student Nithin, who corrected some bug in the system.  Can someone look into it, check whether it is safe to add, and approve? 

  BTW, the lab has run well, and through the years;  I am currently offering it with some 20 final year students (another session is happening parallel in S4 with around 50 students.)   Just to update, NIT Curriculum has CS right from the first year, and  now we are offering the lab in S4.  most of the basic stuff like data structures and computer organization are done by the end of the first year and OS and DBMS are in the fourth semester now. 

   Another update:  Subsequently, we have got a platform for DBMS lab, which is also working well for a few years now. 

nitcbase.github.io. 

    We are in the process of developing one for networks lab.  Here is the draft version:

expserver.github.io

     Based on your experience in the industry, if you have any suggestions or comments on the networking experiment (which is under development), please let me know.  I will pass on the comments to the student team and try to incorporate whatever is possible. 

Regards

Murali. 

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[Navaneeth Kishore]

Hi Sir,

I was going through the expServer. It looks very nice compared to the old network lab which was just a set of unstructured assignments. It's very structured and clean, and it's really nice to see the students write a multi-module project with automated tests, coding conventions, (a logger!!) and so on. I feel these kinds of labs set students up well for the industry. I wish I was starting B.Tech now, than in 2014 :p

Some comments on expServer as I skimmed through the roadmap.

1. In Phase 0 Overview, The intro gives a picture that "the computers in huge data centers are different". But are they?

That is true in some sense - for example a datacenter as a whole is supposed to be durable, designed for single node failures, horizontally scalable etc. But at the same time, if you focus on an individual node - each node is also not very different from the server that the students will be implementing? Wouldn't they also use TCP/IP, take HTTP requests from clients and process them the same way etc? We are taking nginx as a design reference, which is what is heavily used in this space.

2. There is a really nice testing utility pre-made for the students. Would it have been feasible to get the students to write their own simple tests in C? The lab will need to give a framework within which students can easily write tests. This will introduce students to self testing (close to unit testing), which is highly valued in the industry.

But I understand that this will increase the scope and might not be feasible, so can C module level test be pre-written, which the students can just keep enabling as they progress through the roadmap? It will be an interesting experiment to see if such a test suite could be crowd-developed and maintained by the student community once a framework is in place. This might make sense only if it eases the student experience - for example, if you find that students break existing functionality frequently while making new changes, and UTs can help catch that early.

By the time I read up till stage 9 - I started appreciating that it goes much beyond the networks that were taught to our batch. :) Curious to know if students will be able to complete this in a single semester 3/4 credits lab course, or what do you have in mind?

Regards,
Navaneeth

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[Murali Krishnan]

Thanks Navaneeth for the quick comments.

I will definitely put the first point into discussion with the team.  Not sure whether we have enough manpower now to handle the second meaningfully.  I will discuss with Vinod sir on that and finalize. 

BTW, the lab is run currently (on test mode) with just 6 students, and three of them have reached stage 11 already mid way through the semester.  So, it definitely is not undoable.  

Moreover, our plan is that an average student completing the first five stages, reading the theory documentation also well,  must have good background to face placement interviews on networks,  and anything done further must add surplus advantage,  with a clear advantage in case one completes the HTTP parsing state machine of Phase III.     

Regards

Murali

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सादर धन्यवाद/ Best Regards,

मुरली कृष्णन के. /  Murali Krishnan K.

प्राध्यापक/ Professor
संगणक विज्ञान एवं अभियांत्रिकी विभाग/ Department of Computer Science and Engineering
राष्ट्रीय प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान कालिकट/ National Institute of Technology Calicut