At last our group reinforcements arrived! Mohammed is now joined by Suleiman in the Lion group, Ibrahim is joined by Angela in the Leopard group and Kanam is joined by Zainab in the Cheetah group.

We spent a short time reviewing work to date for the benefit of our new arrivals and went through the expectations for the group projects in some detail.

We then proceeded with our introductory module on How the internet works which dealt with physical connections and how information is sent in packets and switched by routers between source and destination. We addressed numeric network addresses and how these are mapped to domain names using the domain name service (DNS). Authoritative regional registries maintain network address allocations and top level domain registries control the allocation of domain names.

Our introductory internet considerations led to our second module on Cloud computing. We reviewed virtualisation and the many benefits afforded to suppliers and users. We focused on Amazon Web Services and how internet server and associated services can be deployed in that particular cloud.

After lunch we logged in to an AWS account which has been set up for the workshop. We launched a new instance and saw what options were available for creating this with the AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) options. In particular we noted how a public/private key pair is necessary to initially connect to and log in to the new server instance and that a security group (set of firewall rules) can further control access to the server.

The PuTTY application suite on a Windows personal computer was used by the group system administrators to log into the group servers at AWS by using the private keys which had been created with the group servers. Several system tasks were followed after logging in, including creating new user accounts for other group members.

PuTTY was used by group members to create personal public/private key pairs and the public key was forwarded to the group leader for installation on the server so that the new users would be able to log in at some later stage.

System administrators updated server software and used the nano editor to change some configuration files, and generally become accustomed to using the Linux command line interface. Meanwhile new group members created Google accounts as required and began updating notes in their Google Drive collection of documents.

We concluded the day by viewing a video which illustrated how pervasive social media applications have become for many ordinary people.