(this is actually my first NANOG post ever...) --On Thursday, May 23, 2002 03:07:55 +0100 cw <security@fidei.co.uk> wrote:
I am currently studying a BSc degree in merry old England. I have just finished my second year (well I'm part way through the exams). When I applied to do my degree I found two universities whose course were anything related to Networking. Mine is called Computing (Networks and Communications).
<snip explanation of curriculum that I'd avoid> At the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, we have a series of courses that focus on networking. The starting one can be seen as "getting the programmer to know IP's quirks", but as we progress, we teach deeper and deeper into the technicalities of routing, including theory of routing (discussion of Dijkstra, and similar) and practice; we have a routing lab where we first make them understand that static routes don't work and then progress into understanding first OSPF, then BGP. The entire package runs over a period of half a year. Prereqisites are that the student is at her/his third year in a Master of Science path aiming for one of Computer Science, Technical Physics or Electric Engineering; i.e. we want people to have a solid ground in theory before we teach them the dirty details of networking. The best students are encouraged to write their final paper in the field of networking. Some of these are later found working at KTHNOC operating the NREN Sunet and the pan-Nordic REN NorduNet. Myself, I teach DNS in the introductory classes, including such novelties as DNSSEC, which we have the students sweat over in the lab. I've been somewhat depressed by the point-and-click generation, who don't understand classic Unix, (because the DNS part does border quite a bit on sysadmin stuff, which we do not teach) but on the whole, it's been successful. -- Måns Nilsson Systems Specialist +46 70 681 7204 KTHNOC MN1334-RIPE We're sysadmins. To us, data is a protocol-overhead.