Sean's IT Blog

At this point in time, 5G is still being implemented around the United States, but technology is already rapidly moving towards the next generation in cellular technology with 6G networks. These networks will have the capability to use higher frequencies, provide higher capacity, and offer much lower latency than 5G. The biggest claim is that it will support one microsecond latency communications. It will have the ability to work with Artificial Intelligence to facilitate data storage, processing, and sharing. Also, it will utilize signals in higher frequency ranges that can theoretically reach peak data rates of 1 terabyte per second. The access points will be able to serve multiple users simultaneously via Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access which is where there are multiple independently modulating subcarriers within frequencies that allow simultaneous transmission to and from multiple clients. It will be very interesting to see the future of mobile networks and just what ...

This week we dove into portable computers, their designs, what they're used for, and the advantages they bring to the table. That's why I decided to use this blog post to talk about the future innovations and technology that will most likely be coming to laptops soon. The biggest and most obvious one will be the upgrades to the processors. Intel has revealed that it will be launching its 12th Generation Intel Core mobile processors which will speed up performance by around 40% compared to the 11th Generation. On top of this, the new 14-core processors will be able to support DDR5 RAM. Some newer computers like the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus will be getting a second screen on the side of the keyboard that acts as a miniature tablet. Its purpose is to increase productivity and multitasking, while also serving as a way to take notes quickly on the side without affecting anything on the main screen. Asus is designing a new gaming tablet that has the capabilities for a Nvidia 3050 Ti GPU...

Seeing as Wi-Fi technology has reached the next peak with 6e, I was curious to see when Wi-Fi 7 would be coming and what differences it would have. Wi-Fi 7 will be defined in the IEEE P802.11be amendment. According to Intel it will have greater than 5 Gbps PC Wi-Fi speeds with consistent ultra-low latency. It will have 320 MHz channels that are twice the size of previous Wi-Fi generations. 4K Quadrature Amplitude Modulation that enables each signal to more densely embed greater amounts of data compared to the 1K QAM of Wi-Fi 6/6e. I will also have a potential maximum data rate of almost 5.8 Gbps which is 2.4x faster than the 2.4 Gbps that is possible with Wi-Fi 6/6e and also the ability to download 15 GB file in about 25 seconds. With Multi-Resource Units and Puncturing, it will be able to use other parts of the same high-speed channel not in use to enable very large channels. It is also speculated to have upgraded security with the eventual WPA4.

I wondered what might happen to NAT now that IPv6 is quickly replacing IPv4. The book mentioned NAT64 as the new version but it doesn't work that same. Instead, it is a mechanism for IPv4 to IPv6 transition and coexistence. Its primary purpose is to allow an IPv6 client to initiate communications with an IPv4 server and vice-versa. So far it's one of only a few methods that set up this type of communication. The benefits are that older applications running on IPv4 will still be used even during and after the transition so they will need to be accessed somehow and then vice versa when the application is on IPv6 and IPv4 devices will need to connect to them. It works by binding the IPv6 port and address to an IPv4 port and address and creates a mapping so that they can communicate There are two types of NAT64 translation: Stateless NAT64 - the state is not preserved, which means for every IPv6 user a dedicated IPv4 address is required.  This type won't be in use that often u...

I wanted to use this week's blog post really for me, but for anyone reading as well. The book explained VLANs and a few facets of it, but I'm still struggling to get my head around every concept. The virtual local area network (VLAN) is a group of connected devices offering all the capabilities typically associated with a local area network (LAN), but with a few differences. VLAN devices don't have to be on the same network or physically connected to operate. Since the device connections are created logically, the connections are not impacted by the location of each device. There are two types of VLAN, Port-based and Tagged: - In a port-based, there is a single physical switch that is divided into multiple logical switches which can be configured to allow only certain devices to communicate with others. There will need to be one cable connected to the physical switch per VLAN. Port-based is considered a nightmare when it comes to wiring. - In tagged, multiple VLANs can be u...

Kubernetes is a portable open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both declarative configuration and automation, letting you run distributed systems resiliently, with scaling and failover for your application. Also called a Container Orchestrator. Organizations run applications on physical servers and there were no ways to define the resource boundaries which cause resource allocation issues. When running multiple applications on the physical server, if one application took up most of the resources, the other applications would underperform. The solution would have been to make more physical servers, but this is very expensive. Virtualization was introduced as the answer to this problem. This gave organizations the ability to run multiple Virtual Machines on a single physical server. It allows applications to be isolated between the VMs and provides more security.  Kubernetes were introduced as an improvement to Virtual Machines, but th...

 This week we dove into the topic of network naming and the Domain Name System. I became interested in the topic of DNS security when a classmate used their discussion board this week to talk about the flaw of the Domain Name System where attackers could essentially spoof the DNS server and collect information from users that try to connect to it. According to multiple websites, the demand for improved DNS security software will see an exceptional increase in demand. This is due to the huge increase in remote/work-from-home labor that corporations and organizations are seeing. Along with this attacks on networks increased rapidly, with almost a 15% increase from 2020 to 2021. As more and more people use DNS in and out of the workplace, increased security is needed as it better prevents phishing and keeps workers from getting on hacked or hazardous websites by having an available list that tracks bad domains. DNS also helps customers to feel safe when visiting domains online. Leadin...

While going over the file systems in the book this week and in the discussion, we talked a little about the future of file systems and the flaws that should be improved upon. Microsoft made an improvement to its file system with the introduction of the Resilient File System (ReFS) with Windows Server 2012. It was created with the intent of being the next-generation file system after NTFS. The only problem currently is that it is only really available for Windows 10 and 11 Pro For Workstations and Enterprise. It can't be used with a single drive but can be used with a pool of drives using the Storage Spaces feature (RAID). It's designed to maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity with resiliency to corruption. It also seeks to address an expanding set of storage scenarios and other innovations. It introduced new features like automatic metadata integrity checking that can precisely detect corruptions an...

This week I wanted to take some time and use this week's blog post both as a personal review and extra reading. When going through the routing chapter the topic of Network Address Translation came up and I felt like I'm still confused about it.  NAT is a way to map multiple local private addresses to a public one before transferring the information. It helps when organizations and companies want multiple devices to use a single IP address. Home routers will also do the same thing with devices on the network. NAT was originally introduced to help ease the shift from IPv4 to IPv6 since the world was exhausting its supply of IPv4 addresses. It's great for security and keeping private IP addresses from being used for interactions on the global network. There are three different types of NAT:  Static NAT - When the local address is converted to a public one, the NAT chooses the same one, meaning that it will have a consistent public IP address.  Dynamic NAT - The NAT chooses t...