Wow, I just finished the assignment for BGP measurements in CS6250. It was another great assignment — it took me about 8-10 hours, from cracking the instructions to finishing the autograder.
If I had one bit of advice to give on this assignment, it’s to focus on one task at a time. Each task can take 2, 3, 4 minutes to complete, and so if you’re waiting for a complete run, it can take 10-15 minutes easily. I modified my implementation to skip tasks that I’d already written to work correctly, so I could run the checking script more often, with only a couple of minutes between runs.
I have to admit that one big thing that I’ve learned from this class is that the Internet really is a jungle. I had this idea that it was very structured and hierarchical; finding out how flat and chaotic the routing process is has really blown my mind. It does make me wonder at the suitability of self-government in this kind of work. The fact that so many autonomous systems, some hostile to each other, can collaborate to form a working network is kind of inspiring.