You are not required to submit your lab solutions. You do the labs for your own learning and compare with the solution that we upload at the end of the week. While the exercises are not assessed, it is important that you complete these as you will have a lab exam in Week 10 based on the content of these exercises.
Although your labs are not supervised, there is a weekly consultation (time and venue to be announced soon) where you can ask your lab tutor any questions about the labs.
If you have implemented a ping client that is receiving messages back from the ping server (whose code is provided), then your program is working fine. Your ping client should run with the following command, as specified in the task description:
java PingClient host port (if using java)
PingClient host port (if using C)
where host is the IP address of the machine where you have run the provided server code and port is the port at which the server is listening.If you have implemented it correctly, you should see output on your terminal after running the ping client similar to the output of the ping program for Unix/DOS, e.g.:
ping to 127.0.0.1, seq = 1, rtt = 120 ms
Exact format of this output can vary according to your code; however you should see a number of such lines printing when you run the program, else the communication between the client and server is not happening and you may need to debug your code (e.g. add print statements in the server code to see if it is receiving the ping messages from the client).
As long as your ping is working, and your graph has the following property mentioned in the lab spec, you are doing fine: "the y-values are no smaller than 2 since it takes at least 2*T time for any packet to reach thedestination from UNSW and get back." Basically your ping RTT should be muchmore than double the time value that you have calculated using Google Maps.That is all you need to check. The answers to why this happens are given inthe solution that has been uploaded.