The goal of this assignment is to implement a client-server application which emulates the ping utility. It is also good practice because it implements the client-server architecture, which is one of the most common architectures for network applications. The server should run on a port that is not well known. Examples of well known ports include 80 (Http), 20/21 (ftp), 22 (SSH), etc. Anything above 5000 is generally considered safe.
The purpose of your Client-Server is to see if another computer is on the network. If you are unfamiliar with the ping application you should investigate it first. You can access ping by opening up a command line and typing “ping” followed by return. A normal invocation of the command would be “ping 192.168.1.1” or “ping localhost”. You can also give it domain names such as “ping google.com”.
Client:
The client should be a command line utility similar to that of ping. While you may implement a GUI if you wish, there must be a command line interface. It should accept an IP address as one of it’s possible parameters. Once it receives a response from the server, it should print out the time delay, similar to ping’s output.
Server:
You will need to implement a server application to run on machines which you wish to ‘ping’. The server simply needs to ‘echo’ back to the client indicating it received the ‘ping’. Since you don’t need to pass actual information your packets from and to the server can be minimalistic. Since you’ve already implemented a server in the previous project, this may be a good place to start. The server for this project does NOT need to be multithreaded but you may make it multithreaded if you wish
