Re: Ada program needs to ping another machine.

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> writes:

> 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).

Get the C source for ping from the Linux distribution, and either
pragma Import some of it, or translate it all to Ada.

> 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.

There are other talk programs out there; I doubt an Ada one would add
much. It would, of course, be fun to do :).

-- 
-- Stephe