I’m trying to teach the HTTP and DNS lesson. We are currently learning GET commands and how they work. This a picture of the directions. My question is how are students supposed to know the hostnames for each person, UNLESS the student groups are suppose to join the same router. Sometimes they have to join the same router and sometimes they have to join different routers than their group mates, and I’ve noticed the directions tend to be unclear as to when it is the same or different.
If they have to join the same router, than the hostname part is much lesson confusing because they can see each other’s hostname, just not the IP.
Thanks for any clarification.
I agree that this lesson is not super clear about connecting to the hosts. I would probably connect to the same router for this one to learn about the GET command syntax. You are totally correct that if students are on different routers and cannot see each other’s hostnames, they would not be able to request an IP address directly. That can be part of the intended lesson. The fact that they don’t know the hostname across routers (in a distributed environment) might work with this framing:
- In real networks, a device always starts with a hostname (like a URL), and then uses DNS to look up the corresponding IP. Without a hostname, there’s nothing to query.
So in this activity, when students are separated across routers, they should be given or have access to a hostname (either through the prompt or a shared directory). Otherwise, they don’t have enough information to proceed with a DNS lookup or a GET request.
I don’t see that information in the instructions - which makes it hard! I might ahve students write their hostnames on a post-it, and then stick it to the back of their monitor or somwhere where other students can see so that they can ping each other through the GET command.
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