Re: Newbie: where to start
Re: Newbie: where to start
- Subject: Re: Newbie: where to start
- From: "Justin C. Walker" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:04:11 -0700
On Sep 23, 2005, at 17:42 , Mark Dawson wrote:
I'm new to networking (did a little Open Transport many years
back), and would like to create a simple app--a diagnostic that
finds all the nodes on my local network, plus some remote (such as
www.apple.com and www.google.com). The app would then "ping" those
addresses on command--just a quick way to verify whether I've lost
my DSL connection or something internal to my network.
I found the "simplePing" program that works to ping hosts (and
figures out what the IP address is of "www.apple.com"). However, I
wasn't sure how to figure out the local network addresses. I
wasn't sure if Bonjour was the way to go. Any ideas?
It's not easy to discover all "local" addresses without some
administrative help (typing them in).
One idea, often frowned on by network admins, is local broadcast
pings (e.g., if your network is 192.168.21/8, then ping
192.168.21.255). It is unreliable for several reasons (systems may
not respond; systems may not receive the ping,; ...).
Bonjour will only let you discover registered systems (AFAIK).
I'd also like some pointers on where to look to learn more about
Mac (or general) networking--I'm not sure where a starting point
is. I know I need to understand better sockets, but I'm sure
there's more :) I picked my "network" ping app more because I
could find it useful (maybe there already is something like that?)
but more importantly, I thought it would be a good introduction
into networking…
The best place to start is the books by W. Richard Stevens, "Unix
Network Programming". Vol. 1 of the 2nd edition has an excellent
treatment of the subject. It's a bit dated, but still valuable.
There is a 3rd edition of this book, written by others (Stevens died
several years ago). It has more recent content, has received high
marks from others, but I have not read it.
In addition, Stevens' website (<http://www.kohala.com>) has tarballs
of code for networking and other aspects of Unix programming. His
code is worth looking at, as examples of how to implement various
functions.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Justin
--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large
Institute for General Semantics
--------
Experience is what you get
when you don't get what you want.
--------
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