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- === !FreePing Help File
-
- Motivation
-
- If you do not know what "ping" is or how to use it stop now. You will
- be wasting your time.
-
- I wanted to have an implementation of ping which did not lock up the
- WIMP even in a TaskWindow. I do not care about flood functions or anything
- much to do with ethernets. I just wanted to check if nodes are up and how long
- packets take to make a round trip because the internet is so flaky and changes
- so much that *something* is always down.
-
- Health Warning
-
- !FreePing is blacksmithed code. It is ancient code from the days of UNIX soldered
- onto a pedagogical RISC-OS application using a collection of freeware libraries.
- The building is done with Acorn Desktop C version 4. It probably should be done
- with Toolbox and C++ (or Java and JDK-Classlib or Ada95 and an old windsock).
- But it isn't because I will not pay money for something cobbled together with
- cfront - neither at work and certainly not at home.
-
- It works. On my machine using Internet 5.02 with RO3.70. If it does not work
- for you remember the advice from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenence,
- "For assembling the item great peace of mind is required."
-
- It it fails you then given the nature of pinging you are probably using
- a stressed system. If you are going to write a problem report to the e-mail
- at the bottom of the helpfile then decide if you have the time to re-run
- a test in a calmer state of mind and log the results OR hey, maybe it's
- not worth bothering. It's free and you probably want to do what you were
- doing when it went wrong. !FreePing is supplied "as is" and is not warranted
- to function on any particular machine. Also using !FreePing does not imply
- any liability for consequential damages.
-
- Copyright
-
- The software !FreePing is Copyright © Peter Chambers 1998.
- Certain parts and libraries have copyrights from other authors whose
- copyright does not preclude inclusion.
-
- !FreePing is FREEWARE and may be used by anyone. It may be distributed
- freely by non-profit means. If a fee is charged for copying it that fee
- must be strictly to cover the costs of the copying process. All copying
- and distribution must be of the whole software including all relevent
- notices, credits and documentation.
-
- It must not be sold for commercial gain or distributed as part of a
- "cover disc" or profit making software library without the permission of
- the author. In the interests of users distribution by on-line means is
- preferred and attempts will be made to ensure the latest version is available
- on-line.
-
- Credits
-
- The basic function of !FreePing is based on the NetBSD ping.c ported to RISC-OS
- by Tom Hughes who seems to have written much of the RISC-OS freeware starting
- with FreeNet (though others are now following his sterling example).
-
- The application skeleton is based (a lot!) on Client_Ex by Duncan Ferguson.
- Duncan took the attitude that other authors could make what they wanted of it.
- I used it to learn how to hack network applications under a dozy GUI. Thanks.
-
- The look'n'some'of'feel and the sprites come from !Ping by Tim Howarth which
- is a front end for the command line ping. I lifted the idea of the Most Recently Used
- hostnames from !Ping. Tim encouraged me to just get on with it and replace !Ping
- with !FreePing in the interests of the users. He also strongly advocated using BASIC
- as the size of the runimage is small. Even with the Best Basic In The World I had to
- write it in C as the sight of lines like "block!8=&0700008" brings on the red mist.
- Tim also changed the Templates to be a bit neater.
-
- The next layer down is the ShellLib by Julian Smith which I needed for the output
- window. This uses DeskLib also by Julian. He took the same helpful attitude as
- the others are replied promptly to my news plea when I found that DeskLib had
- no "txt" element. One day the ghosts of RiscOS-lib will be finally laid.
- Until that time free libraries like this which have what programmers actually
- use will be our stopgap.
-
- The network interface is provided by NetLib which has the names of Andy Mell
- and Stewart Brodie in it's credits. Long ago they tried to explain to me why RiscOS
- cannot use "close()" for sockets. Stewart used the word "disjoint" to explain.
- This does not detract from the immense value they have given Acorn programmers
- in NetLib. Since it matches the interface is Comer and Stevens straight from
- the box that's the one that got used. I gather that Adam Goodfellow did the
- "gettimeofday()" function which cannot quite guarantee the microseconds so
- the time results get granularised in the code (which should always have been
- possible).
-
- History
-
- 0.05 First open beta release.
-
- 0.04 Properly fixed re-init of timing variables, trimmed wimpslot.
-
- 0.03 Added text window save function in menu.
-
- 0.02 Changed templates (courtesy T.Houghton), fixed close gadget,
- removed blank line at end of !Run.
-
- 0.01 improved LRU code, added timing granularity, tried close on textwin (failed)
-
- 0.00 First written with basic functionality. Not released yet.
-
- Author
-
- Peter Chambers mailto: freeping@hightown.demon.co.uk