BMO Training Network Management Games

From AptivateOER

Contents 1 ISP Game 2 Hacking Game 3 DNS Game 4 Virus Glutton 5 League Tables of Bad Behaviour 6 Networking Game

[edit] 1 ISP Game

The idea of this game is to give participants an experience of both sides of the Internet service business: as customer and as ISP, and to equip them with the tools to make choices among ISPs based on the real bandwidth they actually deliver.

• Divide into groups of 2
• Half the groups will be ISPs and half customers
• ISPs get a fair share of the bandwidth available to the class from the Internet link. They get to pass it on to their customers and configure their BMO boxes to share the available resource.
• ISPs think of a name for their business and advertise their services on a sheet of paper /card displayed over their desk/computer. This includes the price for service.
  • Probably want to use tokens for money.
• ISPs configure their BMO boxes .
• Customers choose an ISP, configure their default gateway and set about getting as much bandwidth as they can from their ISP
  • Note that this puts the customers in direct competition to use available bandwidth, though this might not be a desirable situation, it might closely resemble the reality for Kenyan Universities.
• Customers can switch ISP and try for the best deal.
• Use PMGraph to shwow how much bandwidth they got
• Customer who gets the best deal is the "winner"
• ISP who earns most money/tokens is the "winner"
• After a while, stop the game
• have a go round about what works and what does not, what are good techniques for configuring the service, what techniques do customers use to get as much bandwidth as possible?
• Switch over so the customers become ISPs; round 2!
• Possibly intervene with CCK who will close down the poorest performing ISPs for not delivering a good service
  • Demoted ISPs become customers (and a customer is promoted to replace them)
  • Possibly CCK may select arbitrary ISP to shut down.

[edit] 2 Hacking Game

Network managers probably have experience of defending against attacks by crackers and hackers, they might not have experience of attacking themselves. This game is about attacking and defending.

• Work in pairs
• Each pair is required to provide certain services
  • Mail
  • Web
  • SMB
  • ...?
• Use Nagios to verify that these services are maintained (otherwise this game becomes very simple as he defenders can shut down all services
• Grant an agreed amount of down time to give teams a chance to reconfigure and even re-wire
• The object is to hack into other peoples servers and prevent them from providing the service: e.g.
  • ssh to server and shutdown,
  • denial of service attacks

[edit] 3 DNS Game

Before a practical session on configuring DNS, it may be useful to play this game to give participants experience of the problem that DNS is solving.

• Split the class in half; one half watches.
  • Alternatively, one half could take turns to make domain resolution requests.
• People are DNS zones/sub-domains, machines are hosts
• Have a bunch of domains to use, e.g. from logfiles. Write full domain names on paper/card to give to the people making requests (so they are consistent in what they are looking for)
• Ask people if they know the route to a host
• Depending on their zone, they point to the next level domain, or to the top level or at a host (box)

If top level zones become busy, introduce additional top level domain hosts/players for load balancing.

People asking for hosts can, more or less ask anyone to start the process as they may be referred up to top level or down to a sub domain.

Consider getting them to work through the algorithm for resolving a host name starting with the top level domain.

[edit] 4 Virus Glutton

Turn the virus problem on its head. In order to identify what kinds of behaviour are contributing to virus problems in the University, ask the participants:

• What would you do in order to infect your computer with as many viruses as possible?

[edit] 5 League Tables of Bad Behaviour

Various kinds of behaviour contribute to overuse of the Internet connection. In order to inform decisions such as policy choices, it is useful to know which activities are the most damaging.

Baseline:

• Brainstorm a list of behaviours that contribute to bandwidth overuse.
• Sort Sort them into a league table of the most damaging.
• Conduct experiments to measure the effects on the network of various kinds behaviours
  • Downloading with Bit torrent
  • Uploading (e.g. images to Flickr, videos to YouTube, p2p sharing, especially on asymmetric link)
  • Listening to Internet Radio
  • YouTube/iPlayer/Vimeo
  • Email
  • Instant Message
  • Online games
• Re-visit the league table
  • You will probably have some debate as there are no specific answers
  • Even with this quantitative information, there are still issues about how to inform policy, consider using Fishbowl debate on which are allowable or have priority.

[edit] 6 Networking Game

The objective is for each computer to be able to ping every other computer in the classroom.

• Level 1: easy, all the PCs are in clusters, on the same subnet and networked together with Ethernet. Look at the physical topology. What emerges? How do we provide redundancy, performance, scalability and security?
• Level 2: delegate control by subnetting the group and setting up routing tables. Implemented by new rule: clusters must connect between two PCs or routers, neither end may be a switch or a bridge. May choose to practice DHCP and DNS proxies at this point.
• Level 3: assign clusters to different physical locations in Kenya or campuses of a university. Identify the needs for connections between them. Look at physical obstacles, real or imagined, and technologies that can overcome them. Rank the technologies based on how well they suit the requirements. Budget for the connection.
• Level 4: improve the security of the network by implementing VLANs and access controls on gateway points. Try to break into each others' networks. Note that ping must still work. Consider enforcing accessibility of other protocols as well.
• Level 5: implement NAT and port forwarding for the internal networks. Test the security of other groups. Test that we cannot use them to shield our IP from the Internet (joe jobs).