Examples · Cloud & Cybersecurity

Appunti del Sistemista: ask the book

Marco Bellini's book, 501 pages from the first ping to the GPU datacenter. Free for ITS INCOM students, and loaded on the platform: ask it anything, from your personal area or from your code.

The book

Appunti del Sistemista — Cloud & Cybersecurity, by Marco Bellini: 2026 edition, 501 pages, in Italian. Thirty-five years of Internet, from FidoNet to Kubernetes and the GPU datacenters behind AI, in eight parts:

1. Network fundamentals: the OSI model, TCP/IP, DNS, NAT.
2. Advanced networking: subnetting, IPv6, dynamic routing, Wi-Fi to 5G, VPNs, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3.
3. Systems, code and data: Linux, Windows Server and Active Directory, Bash, Python, databases.
4. Virtualization and home-made cloud: KVM, Proxmox, Ceph, software-defined networks, AWS, Azure, GCP.
5. Cybersecurity: from Mitnick to Stuxnet, Nmap, Wazuh, MITRE ATT&CK, incident response, GDPR and NIS2.
6. Containers and Kubernetes: Docker, then Kubernetes, day by day.
7. AI and infrastructure: datacenters, GPUs, fast networks, LLMs, and who is sovereign.
8. What remains: documentation, runbooks, postmortems, certifications.

Get your copy, free

1. Open daikolab.ch/book.
2. Leave your name and email, and add the class code: your teacher gives it to you in class.
3. The email you receive contains your download. With the class code the book is free.

Ask the book, without code

The book is loaded on ITS INCOM AI as a shared collection: everybody can ask it questions, nobody can change it.

1. Sign in at my.ai.itsincom.org and open Documents.
2. Choose Appunti del Sistemista from the list of collections (it is marked shared).
3. Ask, in English or in Italian. Start with something concrete: What is ARP poisoning, and how does a man-in-the-middle attack work on a local network? or What is a pod in Kubernetes, and what does kubectl get pods show?

Every answer cites the parts of the book it comes from, like [Appunti del Sistemista.pdf — part 296], and Sources under it shows a short excerpt of each: open your copy and check.

Ask the book from your code

You need your API key, from Your first API call in Python.

pip install requests

import os

import requests

API = "https://api.ai.itsincom.org/v1"
BOOK = "appunti-del-sistemista"

reply = requests.post(
    f"{API}/knowledge-bases/{BOOK}/ask",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['API_KEY']}"},
    json={"question": "What is the principle of least privilege? Give an example."},
    timeout=120,
)
reply.raise_for_status()
answer = reply.json()

print(answer["answer"])
print()
for source in answer["sources"]:
    print(f"- {source['document']}, part {source['part']}")

To see every collection you can ask:

curl https://api.ai.itsincom.org/v1/knowledge-bases \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

Exercise

• The cover asks What happens after the ping? The whole book is the answer: ask it one step at a time (DNS, ARP, routing, ICMP) and put the steps together.
• Ask three questions about the same chapter, and compare the answers with the book.
• Ask the same question in the chat, without the book: what changes? Which answer would you trust in an exam?
• Ask something the book does not cover: the model should say that the book does not answer it.

Good to know

• Every question uses your credits, from the chat and from the API alike.
• The book is in Italian; the answer comes in the language of your question.
• model and top_k are optional. Without model the answer comes from gemma-4-26b, in a few seconds; for a second opinion try the bigger, slower {"question": "...", "model": "apertus-70b-instruct", "top_k": 8}.

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