I need to send a signal via my remote PC to the Internet that let me know if this pc is connected.
I could send a link with GET values to my page and then from that php page make a query to the database.
How do I send this value through a C program that runs on this remote PC?
thanks!
(it's a windows pc)
For making HTTP requests I recommend libcurl, which is the library that almost everybody seems to be using.
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/
What operating system? Linux? Windows? Does the program need to be cross-platform? The reason I ask is that it influences whether you should use a library, or TCP/IP sockets, given that the request will be very simple.
Also, why not use Perl, or better yet, wget? You could schedule a task in windows, or a cronjob in unix, to wget http://yoururl/path?pcname=`uname` or similar..
What about using a client like dyndns? I'm not sure using a C program would be such a good idea for that purpose; it's a system administration task and using scripting for this would work best, unless you have a specific need in mind.
Related
I have to write a C++ applicaton that has to read images from a local directory on client computer (linux, ubuntu) and send them to a server (linux, ubuntu).
There will be almost 1000 of such clients.
Assuming that the rest of my program is written in C++ I need some hint on what library+technologies to use to achieve this goal?
That would depend on a number of variables.
First, determine what type of format does the server accept? Is it SOAP or not? If yes, you can stream data to the server. Otherwise, you need to read the entire file first and then, send it.
Second, here is a very good article on how to create a web request in C++. Have a look at it: How do you make a HTTP request with C++?
This may not be in the right location, so tell me and I'll move it.
I am a recent EE grad and I was hired to build a system that exists on a SoC with a simple 32-bit processor. The system basically monitors several external devices and performs some DSP on it, and then is supposed to send the results using a WiFi device (in my case I have the ESP8266 using UDP) to an email server for logging/notification.
I have been trying to find a library that I can use, but my uC can only program in C and I have it set up for UDP, and everything is in C++ using some other protocol, or something else completely.
I am great at DSP, decent at SoC's and uC's, but when it come to this email server communication thing I am at a loss.
I have successfully configured everything for the sensors, the datapath, the DSP, and connected the system to my WiFi via UDP, but I have yet to figure out how to send data to any servers.
Could someone help me understand how I should go about this?
I have looked into some simple SMTP commands such as HELO, MAIL, RCPT, DATA, etc. but I cannot understand how I actually should implement them in my code.
When I send out the WiFi data via UDP what type of data do I send and how do I format it? Do I need to send any other kind of flags? How should I expect the response? I also know the data has to be transformed into base 64 which is confusing me further.
I am also not super familiar with UDP to begin with, I have been using libraries that are part of the SoC's default library to connect to my WiFi.
I know these may either seem like obvious or stupid questions but it is were I no longer have any knowledge, and everything I find online doesn't make sense, or doesn't attempt to explain it, just gives a pre-made solution
I have found the RFC2821 but it doesn't get any clearer.
I know that's a lot but any help at all would be a lifesaver!
Since you are asking this question, I'm assuming that you are not booting and running an OS suitable for micro-controllers such as an embedded variant of Linux or such. If you were, you would simply be able to take advantage of possibly built in applications or other existing code.
But you don't mention having written an Ethernet stack, so are you using some other library or operating environment which might have some of the functionality needed for an implementation of SMTP?
If you don't and really do need to write your own SMTP client to run directly on the processor you are using, then you should be able to find plenty of examples of source code for this. A quick google search of How To Write an SMTP client showed a few articles with some example code. One article seems to be an exact hit, but you need to look at it further.
However, I would highly suggest just sitting down with a telnet client and connect to an SMTP server you are allowed to use and try the commands you need to just send a message. If you only need to send text, you don't need to get involved in MIME encoding or anything like that.
I have just managed to write my first windows driver (havent registered it yet- but i managed to get the things created!).
I wondered if someone can give me a high overview of how I could achieve the following:
I would like to write a driver which will implement some behaviour when a network packet is received by the computer, before windows does what it does with the packet, i'd like to take this data and output it to the console of a C or C++ program.
Lets assume I have a C/C++ program written, which has a console. How does the C/C++ program interact with the driver I wrote which is hooking the network activity? Is it simply some C code which calls my drivers, the function returns the data as an object and then I can use that object to display in the console?
Thank you in advance for any possible replies
You don't need a driver for this task. Use packet sniffer library like PCap (actually you'll need WinPCap). It's really simple to capture packets and print them to console.
Alternative way is raw socket. But desktop Windows (as opposite to Windows Server) limits raw socket functionality.
If you really want a driver, or have a requirement to manipulate or filter packets before they hit the windows network stack you need to look into filter drivers.
This filter driver can then expose a device file on which your user space application can then read/write. The windows DDK contains examples.
The user, administrators and support staff need detailed runtime and monitoring information from a daemon developed in C.
In my case these information are e.g.
the current system health, like throughput (MB/s), already written data, ...
the current configuration
I would use JMX in the Java world and the procfs (or sysfs) interface for a kernel module. A log file doesn't seem to be the best way.
What is the best way for such a information interface for a C daemon?
I thought about opening a socket and implementing a bare-metal http or xmlrpc server, but that seems to be overkill. What are alternatives?
You can use a signal handler in your daemon that reacts to, say USR1, and dumps information to the screen/log/net. This way, you can just send the process a USR1 signal whenever you need the info.
You could listen on a UNIX-domain socket, and write regularly write the current status (say once a second) to anyone who connects to it. You don't need to implement a protocol like HTTP or XMLRPC - since the communication will be one-way just regularly write a single line of plain text containing the state.
If you are using a relational database anyway, create another table and fill it with the current status as frequent as necessary. If you don't have a relational database, write the status in a file, and implement some rotation scheme to avoid overwriting a file that somebody reads at that very moment.
Write to a file. Use a file locking protocol to force atomic reads and writes. Anything you agree on will work. There's probably a UUCP locking library floating around that you can use. In a previous life I found one for Linux. I've also implemented it from scratch. It's fairly trivial to do that too.
Check out the lockdev(3) library on Linux. It's for devices, but it may work for plain files too.
I like the socket idea best. There's no need to support HTTP or any RPC protocol. You can create a simple application specific protocol that returns requested information. If the server always returns the same info, then handling incoming requests is trivial, though the trivial approach may cause problems down the line if you ever want to expand on the possible queries. The main reason to use a pre-existing protocol is to leverage existing libraries and tools.
Speaking of leveraging, another option is to use SNMP and access the daemon as a managed component. If you need to query/manage the daemon remotely, this option has its advantages, but otherwise can turn out to be greater overkill than an HTTP server.
I am working on a robot automation project and I have run into a road block. To control the robot, one needs to connect with it wirelessly via telnet and send commands through the tcp/ip protocol. (ex. The 'Mabc' command moves it forward based on the left wheel speed (a), the right wheel speed (b) and time (c)). What I am trying to do is do some calculations in a C program and then send a message to the robot based on the value of the calculation.
How can send commands via tcp/ip protocol in a C program?
Thanks!
Erik
You are looking for sockets. This is a comprehensive guide to socket programming in C. Telnet is also a well defined protocol, although I don't know if this robot would use telnet or not (it's extra processing overhead for a protocol that wouldn't have much added benefit for a robot control program). Telnet is covered in detail by RFC 854
Expect would allow you to interact with external programs, but I am not aware of a C port of expect. Otherwise you would find a telnet library in C or write your own using socket programming.
I would use libcurl: http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/. It'll do what you want, and handle all the telnet goo that you really don't want to handle.
Expect was designed to do exactly this - hold conversations with interactive programs. It's written in Tcl, extending the Tcl interpreter with various commands. Tcl is very easy to extend; it was designed to be an embedded scripting language right from the word go. The main C API uses argv-style constructs to pass parameters to Tcl commands and is very easy to use. The best guide to the C API is Ousterhout's original book and it took me one two-hour lab session to get my first embedded Tcl interpreter up and running.
As a bonus you also get a built-in Tcl interpereter, which you can use to add a scripting capability to your application. You'll probably find that quite a bit of it can be implemented in Tcl if you feel so inclined, so it will probably save you time overall.
I would be:
writing some simple shell scripts containing the telnet interractions written as here documents.
using a .telnetrc file in your home directory to control aspects of your telnet session, e.g. crmod
calling the script using system calls.
This way your turnaround time to change your interractions with the robot won't involve having to recompile your programm all the time.
BTW This sounds like fun.
HTH.
cheers,
Rob