So, I am here with yet another weekly update for my networking class. There’s not much for me to report this week, as we literally just finished a project and I am in the process of winding down for Spring Break. I have started the 3rd project, but all I’ve really done is declare the methods I’m going to be writing and write some spec for them. I’ll be able to do some more after spring break. Right now I’m focused in on midterm exams for other classes, unfortunately.
YANU: Yet Another Networks Update
February 28th, 2010File Transfer Made Simple?
February 21st, 2010So, I’m pleased to report that I’m pretty well situated to turn in my second CSCI 4760 project. I have the file sender successfully transferring files to my file receiver. Unfortunately, I’ve been given some reservation – as I can’t get my program to work harmoniously with Dr. Dan’s example programs… and I’m not sure I’m computing the retry limit correctly. I’m also getting some peculiar results when my log files are generated on Zion. I’m going to be looking into these issues over the next day or so.
Continuing Progress
February 15th, 2010So, I am continuing progress on my file transfer project for my networking class. Here is an update on where I stand:
I have successfully started transferring files of variable length from the sender to the receiver. The entire contents of the file travel successfully and correctly appear in the destination file – however, while the sender successfully realizes that the file has been transferred successfully, the receiver seems to be a little bit clueless and continues waiting for more packets. So I’ve got to track down that bug. I would like to change the protocol to include in the greeting message how many packets the receiver should expect, but I don’t think it would work with Dr. Dan’s classes if I did that. So I’ll have to figure out another way around that.
Regardless, I feel I’m making good progress on the project!
HTTP Server Success
February 7th, 2010After weeks of hard work, I’m finally happy to report that the Simple HTTP Server project is complete! I think it actually turned out pretty well.
In other news I’ve started working on the second 4760 Project. The good thing is that I’ve got both sides of the program talking to each other, although not transmitting files. The receiver program is in the habit of always answering a transfer request with a NAK packet… but I think it’s good progress so far! All of my prototype code is written, so with luck testing will go by pretty fast.
Problems Deploying to Zion
January 30th, 2010It is time again for my weekly project update for 4760!
The good news is that I have my project works at 100% on my local machine. Of course, as soon as I throw it on Zion, things start going wrong. I have had difficulty accurately retrieving the correct exit values from the system exec calls. I’m getting some weird results too. It either always returns an exit code of 0 (meaning that the program was executing successfully) but without giving any output, or always returning 255 (meaning that the program couldn’t run – and probably wasn’t found in the path). It’s really odd…
I think I might be taking advantage of Office Hours on Monday to get Dr. Dan to take a look at my code. I’m thinking a second set of eyes might help see something I don’t. Since I tried deploying to Zion, I’ve been attempting to develop on Zion, without the use of my usual development and debugging tools. In the worst case scenario, I’m going to have to use gdb and figure out why it’s not working… but let’s hope strategically placing couts will make due…
Execute what?
January 23rd, 2010So, this is another one of my weekly updates for my CSCI networking class. I’m happy to report that I’ve made a lot of progress since last week. It’s probable that this week I’ll be finishing up the server and begin testing it on the Zion CS server. Essentially, I’ve got the project listening on the socket and spawning child processes to handle the incoming connections. As per Dr. Dan’s note, we’re not required to be able to handle concurrent connections – although that is possible in theory.
I’ve mainly avoided it because from what I understand, how different systems handle shared memory between multiple threads differs based on implementation. I figured since I was doing my original development on Mac OS X and then deploying my production copy to Zion it would be wise to keep it simple, even though they are both Unix derivatives when you get down to the bare metal.
My to do list at this point is to get the server executing files using the XBitHack (but Dr. Dan says he needs to tweak that part of the assignment, so I’m holding off on implementation) and then to get the server running as a daemon process. After that I should be done. Hip hip hooray!
HTTP and Servers, Oh My!
January 16th, 2010So as I mentioned before, I’m expected to make periodical updates on project status for one of my Computer Science classes. Although the class that requires blog updates is Computer Networking, I find that I’ve been spending most of time recently working on a Java Applet for my Web Programming class (Java, JSP, etc) since that has an earlier due date.
However, I can report that I have made some progress working on the first project. I have the server listening on a socket, accepting a connection, and having an exchange with a client. Now, the project is to write a basic HTTP server, which I could probably accomplish fairly easy using straight C, but to be honest I’ve been so immersed in Object Oriented Programming that I truly think in those terms – so I’ve decided to implement using C++.
The plan is to have the main function manage the connection, then take incoming data and parse them into HTTPRequest objects then use the HTTPRequest objects to generate HTTPResponse objects that can be serialized to strings and sent back over the connection. So, while I haven’t implemented the objects yet, I have defined all of their headers and class members – so I’ve already got a pretty detailed specification of what each method will do.
I’m optimistic that once I get all the socket management stuff down in the main function then the rest of the code will be a cakewalk, because it will almost entirely be string manipulation from that point forward. Gotta love OOP.
First Week of Classes Down
January 8th, 2010So, I have successfully finished the first week of classes (even though it was only two days). I’m optimistic about this semester. As a part of my networking class, I’m expected to blog weekly about progress on assignments and stuff like that, so I’ve created a networking category for those blog entries. We have a special server that the content is supposed to be on, but I’m thinking a link to the blog category here won’t be a problem… at least Dr. Dan doesn’t think it will be.
The primary purpose of this post is to initialize the Networking category so that something exists. Expect some more exciting content later!
Guest Lectures = Good Teaching Tool
December 1st, 2009
Brantley Coile
So Monday my Computer Architecture class got a guest lecture from a guy by the name of Brantley Coile, who was there to talk about the development and history of the hard disk drive. Now, I’m not making note of this because Mr. Coile was a particularly amazing speaker or anything of the sort, but rather because it was a lecture from someone who works in the industry. Mr. Coile is Founter and CTO of Coraid, an Athens, Georgia, based company specializing in network based large-scale storage.
I feel as those academia often suffers from something I’ve labeled the “PhD Delima.” To elaborate: there is a group of in every class of students that absolutely love school. I feel that these are the people who usually end up getting their Masters or PhD’s, and I feel as though there are a great many of them who have never worked in the industry and never want to work in the industry for one reason or anther. So they become teachers.
Now, I have all the respect in the world for teachers and professors because their job is more often than not a thankless task. However, it is validating, in a sense, to hear some of the same material we’ve been reading/hearing about in our architecture class reinforced by someone who makes his living working in the business world, which is where I’d like to end up myself.
In the Spirit of Final Exams
November 20th, 2009So, we’re here at the end of November again. You know what that means: final exams are just around the corner for all of us college students. I have found, through much experience, that the biggest inhibitor to studying for final exams is getting motivated. So, to help motivate everyone – I would like to furnish this video that I saw for the first time last year:
I don’t know about what the average female’s response to this would be, but as a dude it just makes me want to go do something manly… like kill a bear with my bare hands.
