The Beginning of the End
So, this is it. The final frontier. Our last blog post. We made it. High fives all around—we successfully went where no man, woman, or hyper-intelligent anthropomorphic beaver has gone before: the LCDI network.
All joking aside, our team is happy to report that we have completed the tasks laid out before us and successfully created an automated network scanner. We used the device to uncover valuable information, not only on the nature of the LCDI network, but how the individual tools we used mixed and mashed together—and how to best optimize said tools. Our report will be released soon; please take a look!
Since our last post, we ran batteries of formal tests with our script and servers on a private network, writing a detailed micro-report after each cycle of three scans. For each cycle, we passed different flags to the script, organized the results into tables, and interpreted the differences between them. Unsurprisingly, there weren’t too many differences and the fast scan was faster than the non-fast scan. We had some issues with the scanner Pi booting faster than one of the servers but fixed this without any issue. The ease with which we completed and documented all three cycles is a testament to the stability of our script.
We also ran four formal scans on the whole LCDI network, (two over Wifi and two over Ethernet) and each pair included one fast scan and one non-fast scan. These scans ranged from fifteen minutes (wired fast scan) to over two hours (full port wireless scan). Also, unsurprisingly, the results were not far off from those of our previous test scans.
The End of the Beginning
Those were a quick eleven weeks, but that’s not to say they were without their hardships. It was a daunting task to work an internship the first semester of our first year at Champlain College. In that short amount of time, we learned a lot. We wrote scripts in Python, bash, and batch and installed Linux distros and Windows IoT (perhaps more often that we would have liked). We waited for packages to install, printed ASCII cows to the console, set off countless security alarms for the network admins, and wrote some high quality Twitter posts.
See You Space Cowboy…
We didn’t just grow intellectually, however—we grew as people too. Working together with the aid of tools like Trello and Slack has made us better teammates, people, and friends. We are undoubtedly more prepared to enter the workforce after completing our semester-long internship at the LCDI and are grateful for this incredible opportunity.