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Wireshark Lab ICMP

This page is a generated reference surface for selective reading. It exists to keep the learner apps guide-first while still preserving source access.

Learning objectives​

  • Explain the main ideas and vocabulary in Wireshark Lab ICMP.
  • Work through the source examples for Wireshark Lab ICMP without depending on raw chunk order.
  • Use Wireshark Lab ICMP as selective reference when learner modules point back to Computer Networking.

Prerequisites​

  • None curated yet.

Module targets​

  • module-05-network-protocols-sockets

AI companion modes​

  • Explain simply
  • Socratic tutor
  • Quiz me
  • Challenge my understanding
  • Diagnose my confusion
  • Generate extra practice
  • Revision mode
  • Connect forward / backward

Source-of-truth note​

This unit is anchored to Computer Networking and the source chapter "Wireshark Lab ICMP". Use external resources only to clarify, extend, or modernize details without replacing the chapter's conceptual spine.

External enrichment​

No chapter-specific enrichment resources are curated yet. Add them in the unit manifest when a source clearly improves learning.

Source provenance​

  • Primary source: Computer Networking
  • Source chapter: Wireshark Lab ICMP
  • Raw source file: 171-wireshark-lab-icmp.md

Merged source​

Wireshark Lab ICMP​

Wireshark Lab: ICMP

In the Web site for this textbook, www.pearsonglobaleditions.com, you'll find a Wireshark lab assignment that examines the use of the ICMP protocol in the ping and traceroute commands.

Interview: Jennifer Rexford​

Courtesy of Jennifer Rexford Jennifer Rexford is a Professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. Her research has the broad goal of making computer networks easier to design and manage, with particular emphasis on programmable neworks. From 1996-2004, she was a member of the Network Management and Performance department at AT&T Labs-Research. While at AT&T, she designed techniques and tools for network measurement, traffic engineering, and router configuration that were deployed in AT&T's backbone network. Jennifer is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice: Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement," published by Addison-Wesley in May 2001. She served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007. She received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan in 1996. Jennifer was the 2004 winner of ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2016), the NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award (2017), the ACM SIGCOMM award for lifetime contributions (2018), and the IEEE Internet Award (2019). She is an ACM Fellow (2008), an IEEE Fellow (2018), and the National Academy of Engineering (2014).

Please describe one or two of the most exciting projects you have worked on during your career. What were the biggest challenges? When I was a researcher at AT&T, a group of us designed a new way to manage routing in Internet Service Provider backbone networks. Traditionally, network operators configure each router individually, and these routers run distributed protocols to compute paths through the network. We believed that network management would be simpler and more flexible if network operators could exercise direct control over how routers forward traffic based on a network-wide view of the topology and traffic. The Routing Control Platform (RCP) we designed and built could compute the routes for all of AT&T's

backbone on a single commodity computer, and could control legacy routers without modification. To me, this project was exciting because we had a provocative idea, a working system, and ultimately a real deployment in an operational network. Fast forward a few years, and software-defined networking (SDN) has become a mainstream technology, and standard protocols (like standard protocols (like OpenFlow) and languages (like P4) have made it much easier to tell the underlying switches what to do.

How do you think software-defined networking should evolve in the future? In a major break from the past, the software controlling network devices can be created by many different programmers, not just at companies selling network equipment. Yet, unlike the applications running on a server or a smart phone, SDN applications must work together to handle the same traffic. Network operators do not want to perform load balancing on some traffic and routing on other traffic; instead, they want to perform load balancing and routing, together, on the same traffic. Future SDN platforms should offer good programming abstractions for composing independently written multiple applications together. More broadly, good programming abstractions can make it easier to create applications, without having to worry about low-level details like flow table entries, traffic counters, bit patterns in packet headers, and so on. Also, while an SDN controller is logically centralized, the network still consists of a distributed collection of devices. Future programmable networks should offer good abstractions for updating a distributed set of devices, so network administrators can reason about what happens to packets in flight while the devices are updated. Programming abstractions for programmable network is an exciting area for interdisciplinary research between computer networking, distributed systems, and programming languages, with a real chance for practical impact in the years ahead.

Where do you see the future of networking and the Internet? Networking is an exciting field because the applications and the underlying technologies change all the time. We are always reinventing ourselves! Who would have predicted even ten years ago the dominance of smart phones, allowing mobile users to access existing applications as well as new location-based services? The emergence of cloud computing is fundamentally changing the relationship between users and the applications they run, and networked sensors and actuators (the "Internet of Things") are enabling a wealth of new applications (and security vulnerabilities!). The pace of innovation is truly inspiring.

The underlying network is a crucial component in all of these innovations. Yet, the network is notoriously "in the way"--limiting performance, compromising reliability, constraining applications, and complicating the deployment and management of services. We should strive to make the network of the future as invisible as the air we breathe, so it never stands in the way of new ideas and valuable services. To do this, we need to raise the level of abstraction above individual network devices and protocols (and their attendant acronyms!), so we can reason about the network and the user's high-level goals as a whole.

What people inspired you professionally?

I've long been inspired by Sally Floyd who worked for many years at the International Computer Science Institute. Her research was always purposeful, focusing on the important challenges facing the Internet. She dug deeply into hard questions until she understood the problem and the space of solutions completely, and she devoted serious energy into "making things happen," such as pushing her ideas into protocol standards and network equipment. Also, she gave back to the community, through professional service in numerous standards and research organizations and by creating tools (such as the widely used ns-2 and ns-3 simulators) that enable other researchers to succeed. She retired in 2009, and passed away in 2019, but her influence on the field will be felt for years to come.

What are your recommendations for students who want careers in computer science and networking?

Networking is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Applying techniques from other discipline's breakthroughs in networking come from such diverse areas as queuing theory, game theory, control theory, distributed systems, network optimization, programming languages, machine learning, algorithms, data structures, and so on. I think that becoming conversant in a related field, or collaborating closely with experts in those fields, is a wonderful way to put networking on a stronger foundation, so we can learn how to build networks that are worthy of society's trust. Beyond the theoretical disciplines, networking is exciting because we create real artifacts that real people use. Mastering how to design and build systems--by gaining experience in operating systems, computer architecture, and so on--is another fantastic way to amplify your knowledge of networking to help make the world a better place.