self amusement

This entry is meant for network experts to laugh at me.

As a true blue Singaporean, I always gian png look for cheap deals.

In case you don't already know by now, AWS charges by the hour, not by bandwidth. While Prof has already clarified that we will be given more credits for our assignments, I was still wondering whether I could get things done as cheaply as possible (and harbouring the not-so-secret-wish-now that unused credits will be channelled into my bank account as money).

Yesterday during the first workshop, I played around with my localhost, when I tried putting my public IP address as my Facebook test app's URL. It worked!

When I was home last night, I decided to try it again. And this time round, it failed :(



This image hit me hard in the head the moment it showed up on my screen; all that I learnt in CS2105 last semester came flooding me again.

1) The public IP address of my laptop was actually the public IP address of the router in my home. Network address translation was in play here, so when Facebook looked up my URL, what it got back was my router's configuration page.

2) With this it seems like while in NUS, or at least in SoC, we will each be given a public IP address when we log on to the network. (But I forgot to ask my friends to try to access my page. Maybe I could access my own page because it was just a loopback.)

3) The next thing to try may be to bypass my home's router and connect my laptop straight up to the fibre termination point. But I think this will not work because I read somewhere before that ISPs scan for the specific router assigned to the owner.

Anyhow, there will probably be many more layers of NATs around, and with firewalls in place, my teammates won't reach me anyway, which I will need for the 'interaction' part of the assignment.

Well it was fun while I was at it. End of my self amusement.