Network Programming (CIS-3152) Home Page

This is the home page for Peter Chapin's Network Programming course for the Fall 2025 semester. Here you will find electronic versions of class handouts, homework assignments, lecture slides, and links to references. If you are a student taking Network Programming, consider bookmarking this page.

• The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
• The homework submission area and grade book are on Canvas but all other course resources are here.
• Here are instructions on how to set up the development environment we will be using for this course.
• For running servers on Lemuria, please use the ports allocated to you.
• I have prepared a short document on using Git to help you get familiar with the system. Some of the samples I will use in this course are on GitHub.
• The DNS project on GitHub contains a sample DNS client and server showing UDP programming techniques.
• The MailVision project on GitHub contains the C++ version of MailFlux and related subprojects.
• The Chatter project on GitHub contains Chatter, an Ice-based instant messaging system.
• I've prepared some general information on submitting assignments.
• My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

Lecture Topics

• 2025-08-26. Course introduction and overview. Started describing the daytime client.
• 2025-08-28. Finished describing the daytime client program.
• 2025-09-02. Described the daytime server program.
• 2025-09-04. Described concurrent servers using forked processes.
• 2025-09-09. Demonstrated "vibe coding" by adding additional error handling to the echo client program. Finished discussing the concurrent echo server with demonstration.
• 2025-09-11. Demonstrated the threaded version of the echo server. Discussed the potential for deadlock in the echo client/server.
• 2025-09-16. Demonstrated the IPv6 version of the daytime client/server. Discussed the getaddrinfo() function.
• 2025-09-18. Gave an overview of UDP programming and the DNS system.
• 2025-09-23. More discussion about UDP programming in the context of a simple DNS client.
• 2025-09-25. Introduced character sets.
• 2025-09-30. Discussed Unicode in more detail: encoding, BOM, combining characters.
• 2025-10-02. Discussed Homework #2/3 on TFTP.
• 2025-10-07. No class (Vacation).
• 2025-10-09. No class (Vacation).
• 2025-10-14. Demonstrated Unicode samples. Demonstration of Claude Code and JetBrains Junie. Review of bit manipulation operations in C.
• 2025-10-16. Introduced SMTP.
• 2025-10-21. Discussed how to set up a TFTP server for testing Homework #2/3. Gave a tour of the existing MailFlux code base.
• 2025-10-23. Discussed the format of mail messages as described in RFC-5822. Introduced MIME.
• 2025-10-28. Continued the discussion of MIME-encoded mail message bodies, with samples.
• 2025-10-30. Introduced RPC and ONC RPC with the FileServices example.
• 2025-11-04. Introduced Ice.
• 2025-11-06. Showed the FileServices sample in Ice and introduced Chatter..
• 2025-11-11. Continued discussion of Chatter. Did a presentation on VTank, an Ice-based networked game created by VTC students around 2009.
• 2025-11-13. Introduced XML.
• 2025-11-18. More discussion about XML. Introduced XSL.
• 2025-11-20. More discussion about XML/XSL. Introduced Astronomical Observation Markup Language.
• 2025-11-25. No class (Vacation).
• 2025-11-27. No class (Vacation).

Slides

Homework

1. Homework #1 (20 pts) Daytime Client/Server. Due: 2025-09-10.
2. Homework #2/3 (30 pts) Trivial FTP. Due: 2025-10-31.
3. Homework #4 (20 pts) MailFlux. Due: 2025-11-21.
4. Homework #5 (20 pts) Chatter. Due: 2025-12-19.

Samples

• The daytime client/server in C demonstrates the basics of TCP client/server programming using the Sockets API on Unix.
• The echo client/server in C demonstrates how to write a concurrent server. Two versions are provided: one that uses individual child processes to handle each client connection and one that uses threads.
• The IPv6 version of the daytime client/server demonstrates the basics of IPv6 programming using the Sockets API.
• The getaddrinfo() function can be used to look up IP addresses and port numbers. This demonstration program illustrates its use.
• A sample Unicode text file using UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding.
• Some short programs that illustrate a few issues with the handling of extended (non-ASCII) character sets: Java, C++.
• Some sample MIME-encoded email messages: Sample1, Sample2, Sample3, and Sample4.
• My file server and file client sample is an example of ONC RPC.
• My Ice version of the file server and file client sample.
• Course Evaluation Markup Language (CEML) is an example of a custom XML vocabulary (or "application") for storing information about course evaluations. The sample document illustrates the markup. There is a schema that defines what valid documents look like, and an XSLT style sheet for transforming CEML documents into XHTML for presentation on the web.

Resources/Articles

• I've written a C tutorial that you might find useful for reviewing certain concepts from C.
• RFC Index. Here you can look up any RFC or browse the RFC index itself. This sample implements the daytime protocol.
• This Quick Reference for Tshark may be useful for getting started with this complex and powerful tool.
• This document describes how to set up PuTTY and how to set up SSH tunnels using PuTTY.
• ZeroC is the company that develops the Ice middleware system. You can find detailed documentation about Ice on their website.

Labs

In the past this was a lab course. For practical reasons related to the structuring of our overall CIS offerings, the lab was removed from this course. However, the labs are still interesting and can serve as a source of extended examples and as the basis for some assignments.

The lab set is summarized in the lab summary document, along with links to specific lab handouts and supporting code samples.

Last Revised: 2025-12-01
© Copyright 2025 by Peter Chapin <peter.chapin@vermontstate.edu>