This week, I am continuing my network experiment with an Nginx setup on my AWS E2C virtual machine. I followed How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 to install nginx and How To Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 20.04 to get my free TLS/SSL certificate. The default Nginx page is currently available at http://100.26.63.206/ and it will most certainly become unavailable if you are reading this post more than a couple of months later. In addition, I set up two server blocks for https://hi.jbd.lol/ (with TLS/SSL certificate) and http://ad.jbd.lol/ (without TLS/SSL certificate), which are also likely to go away later, depending on whether or not I decide to keep the jbd.lol domain next year. Furthermore, I have an A Record pointing www.ad.jbd.lol to the IP same address as http://ad.jbd.lol/, and I have an URL Redirect Record pointing www.hi.jbd.lol to https://hi.jbd.lol.

In the Understanding Networks class this week, Tom Igoe showed the class the Ball Drop Game. In Tom’s own words, the Ball Drop Game is “a multiplayer game in which players collaborate to keep a ball from hitting the ground”. To play this game, all players need to be on the same network as the game, which is a networked application written in Processing. When we played it for the first time, we all connected to the game using the netcat utility via a command line interface. The netcat utility established TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connections from our laptops to Tom’s laptop, where the Ball Drop Game server application was running.

This week, I’m exploring the paths of my network transactions using the traceroute utility. I started with the websites that I visit most regularly, such as google.com and instagram.com. I wasn’t sure what I would do to analyze the traceroute outputs, so I decided to take screenshots of every website that I traced. Here are a couple of examples:

As a part of the first assignment for the Understanding Networks course at ITP, I set up an Internet host using Amazon Web Services (AWS). On the AWS EC2 Dashboard, I created a virtual server instance from one of the preconfigured Amazon Machine Images named ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd-gp3/ubuntu-noble-24.04-amd64-server-20240801. I noticed that the IP address changes after every reboot, so I went ahead and created an elastic IP to assign it to my virtual server instance. Finally, I have an Internet host with a persistent IP address, which I can conveniently access via an SSH client from my computer.