Ada program needs to ping another machine.

[Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org>]

I'm making a small Ada program (on my spare time) that I want to be able
to run from both Linux and Windows. The problem is it need to check if
another machine is on or off and display this in a small GUI interface.
I can do this by using the ping command on Linux, but I would rather
learn how to do this from Ada. I'm not asking for a solution (of course
if somebody has something they want to share it would be nice), but some
hints on what I should read up on to find out how to do this. Can I use
sockets for instance? I'm developing on Linux and I don't have much clue
about Windows programming so I would like to make this as portable as
possible (that is, just recompiling in windows would be nice).

Eventually it would be nice to evolve the program into a talk program (a
program where one write simultaneously on a split screen) as the wintalk
program is rather unstable and I would hope Ada could increase
security.

Preben
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