CTP Skill Center

Today, among other things, I showed the new students how to do the daily blog post.

Today I explained the class to a new student.

Got new students started in the CTT class.

Here is what I did today. This and that.

Today I gave the new students an orientation of the class. Alan brought his transition snacks and we were all joyous.

Today, the CTT class enjoyed a potluck to celebrate our 2nd to the last day of class. Alex shared one of Professor Messer’s videos discussing ports. After the class watched the video Alex discussed how these ports relate to CTP’s own server running a virtual machine that provides the DHCP, DNS and Active Directory services for the organization. We tried out Slack a collaboration platform and joined CTPs workspace.

I forgot to do my What I did today yesterday so I am doing it today 🙂 Alex discussed more about Wireshark and Nmap. Wireshark is a packet analyzer. Packets is how information is packaged and sent across the network internally or externally. Nmap is a network scanner that can scan network ports. However, it should be used only used within ones’ own network. Our project this week is based in these two tools.

Today I learned more about nMap. It is a network scanner tool that allows you to see what devices are connected to a network, as well as what ports the devices have open. Other variants could be used maliciously to scan the public domain, searching for possible vulnerabilities within networks. There are scans being constantly run over the internet and it is considered an attempted attack to scan somebody else’s network, because this could reveal things that are not your business. However scanning your personal private network is acceptable and this will provide useful information regarding what devices are connected to your own network. I also began working with another program that captures packets being sent over different ports within your system. It is called Wireshark, and I am currently completely mystified by it and I have no idea how it works yet…

Today we had a long lecture and we did a lot of review. We practiced identifying different ports. We drew and labelled a network model. I also learned about the seven layers of the OSI model, but that is something that I’m still very unfamiliar with.

Today, we did a review of Networking concepts. We also did a practice A+ test with Alex where everyone got a chance to figure out or guess multiple choice type hardware questions. It was a collaborative effort and we got a 100% in the test. The review refreshed the different concepts that was discussed and that we hopefully during the past months. The 7 Layer OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) model was introduced comprised of the Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data and Physical layers.