I heard presentations about class projects today for the networking class I'm teaching this semester. The rules for the project are simple: it has to be equal to the effort required for two normal labs, it has to be vaguely about networking, and it has to be fun for the student. As a result, some of it turns into an opportunity to hack. Not everyone presents, but the one's who presented today had some good projects:

• Craig Hancock built an HTTP server with modular handlers for different data types that accepted GET and POST and ran PHP programs.
• Ben Watson built an instant messaging system with his own protocol, a client and server.
• Jeff Hansen built a secure shell server that ran entirely from a RAM disk and then installed it on server with a RAM disk mounted as the boot partition so that if the hard drives failed, he could still log in.
• Nathan Stocks built a distributed parallel computation system similar to SETI@Home and analyzed the parallelizability of RSA key generation.
• Steve Mak set up a SER SIP server and got two XLite softphones talking.
• Matt Mullins and Wade Berrier got Linux running on an XBox and then turned it into a MythTV set-top box complete with remote control.

I thought it was a good group of projects and it was clear that people had fun.