The computing profession has a long and honored tradition of high ethical behavior with regard to the possession of information. At a company for which I once worked programmers had easy access to confidential medical records. For one project I had access to a decade of such information. In spite of this the track record of the profession in honoring the trust given to it is a good one.

The assignments in this chapter are in many ways foundational. Their completion will help you in so many ways, yet the very process of collecting the needed information is fraught with problems. Most likely, your ability to sniff packets at your school will be severely limited for obvious reasons. Assuming you have access to an off-campus network, you may decide to generate your own data. Please, think about the ethical implications.

Assuming that you are able to capture packets you need to know how to get the ones you need for the assignments. To generate ARP packets ping a non-existent host from a special machine. ICMP packets can be obtained by pinging a special machine from another machine. To get UDP packets run rusers on a special machine. TCP packets would be generated by running telnet or ssh on another machine to one of the special machines.