Lab 2 Web Server and UDP Pinger

ENSF 462 Networked Systems
Lab 2 Web Server and UDP Pinger
Lab Section Section Date Location
B01 October 5
th, 2023 ENA 305
B02 October 10th
, 2023 ENG 24
B03 October 4th, 2023 ICT 319
Part 1 – Web Server
Simple Web Server
In this section of the lab, you will continue practicing socket programming for TCP
connections in Python and will learn how to receive an HTTP packet. You will also learn
some basics of HTTP header format.
You will develop a web server that handles one HTTP request at a time. Your web server
should accept and parse the HTTP request, get the requested file from the server’s file
system, create an HTTP response message consisting of the requested file preceded by
header lines, and then send the response directly to the client. If the requested file is not
Acknowledgement:
Part of the content in Lab 2 manual is modified based on the material provided on the
authors’ website for the textbook, Computer Networks, A Top-down Approach, 8
h
ed., J.F.
Kurose and K.W. Ross, Addison-Wesley/Pearson, 2020.
Lab 2 Web Server and UDP Pinger
present in the server, the server should send an HTTP “404 Not Found” message back to
the client.
Code
Along with this manual you will find the skeleton code for the web server in a file named
WebServer.py (posted on D2L). You are to complete the skeleton code. The places where
you need to fill in code are marked with #Fill in start and #Fill in end. Each
place may require one or more lines of code.
Running the Server
Put an HTML file (e.g., HelloWorld.html) in the same directory that the server is in. Run
the server program. Determine the IP address of the host that is running the server (e.g.,
128.238.251.26). From another host, open a browser and provide the corresponding URL.
For example: http://128.238.251.26:6789/HelloWorld.html. ‘HelloWorld.html’ is the
name of the file you placed in the server directory. Note also the use of the port number
after the colon. You need to replace this port number with whatever port you have used in
the server code. In the above example, we have used port number 6789. The browser
should then display the contents of HelloWorld.html. If you omit ":6789", the browser
will assume port 80 and you will get the web page from the server only if your server is
listening at port 80.
Then try to get a file that is not present on the server. You should get a “404 Not Found”
message.
Two sample HTML files have been provided (posted on D2L) to test your code with.
Assumptions
• Only well formatted GET requests are received by your server.
• All requests are for a single html object on the Internet (i.e., you can IGNORE
the case of base html and embedded objects in it).
Optional: Multi-threaded Webserver
Currently, the web server handles only one HTTP request at a time. In this section, we want
to implement a server that is capable of serving multiple requests simultaneously. For this,
we are going to use multi-threading. A thread is a light-weight process that does not need
much memory overhead. Multithreading refers to executing multiple threads
simultaneously in a single process.
Lab 2 Web Server and UDP Pinger
Using multi-threading, first create a main thread in which your modified server listens for
clients at a fixed port. When it receives a TCP connection request from a client, it will set
up the TCP connection through another port and services the client request in a separate
thread. There will be a separate TCP connection in a separate thread for each
request/response pair.
A supplementary reading will be provided and posted on D2L to show an example of multithreading for socket programming in Python.
Part 2 – UDP Pinger
Introduction
In this lab, you will first study a simple Internet ping server written in Python, and
implement a corresponding client. These programs provide functionality similar to the
functionality provided by standard ping programs available in modern operating systems.
However, these programs use a simpler protocol, UDP, rather than the standard Internet
Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to communicate with each other. The ping program
allows a client machine to send a packet of data to a remote machine, and have the remote
machine return the data back to the client unchanged (an action referred to as echoing).
The ping protocol allows hosts to determine round-trip times to other machines.
Server Code and Packet Loss
The Ping server code is provided in “UDPPingerServer.py”. You need to run the
server code before running your client program. You do not need to modify the server code.
The server sits in an infinite loop listening for incoming UDP packets. As UDP provides
applications with an unreliable transport service, messages may get lost in the network due
to router queue overflows, faulty hardware or some other reasons. Because packet loss is
rare or even non-existent in typical campus/home networks, the server in this lab injects
artificial loss to simulate the effects of network packet loss. The server creates a variable
randomized integer which determines whether a particular incoming packet is lost or not.
When a packet comes in and if a randomized integer is greater than or equal to 4, the server
simply capitalizes the encapsulated data and sends it back to the client. In other words,
30% of the client’s packets are simulated to be lost. You should study this code carefully,
as it will help you write your ping client.
Client Code Requirements
The client should send 10 pings to the server. Because UDP is an unreliable protocol, a
packet sent from the client to the server may be lost in the network, or vice versa. For this
reason, the client cannot wait indefinitely for a reply to a ping message. You should get the
client wait up to one second for a reply; if no reply is received within one second, your
client program should assume that the packet was lost during transmission across the
network. You will need to look up the Python documentation to find out how to set the
timeout value on a datagram socket.
Lab 2 Web Server and UDP Pinger
Specifically, your client program should
1. send one ping message per second using UDP. The ping message is a one-line message
in the following format:
Ping sequence_number time
where sequence_number starts at 1 and progresses to 10 for each successive ping
message sent by the client, and time is the time when the client sends the message.
2. print the response message from server, if any
3. calculate and print the round-trip time (RTT), in seconds, of each packet, if server
responses
4. otherwise, print “Request timed out”
5. report the minimum, maximum, and average RTTs at the end of all pings
6. calculate the packet loss rate (in percentage).
During development, you should run the UDPPingerServer.py on your machine, and
test your client by sending packets to localhost (or, 127.0.0.1). After you have fully
debugged your code, you should see how your application communicates across the
network with the ping server and ping client running on different machines.
Submit a lab report that includes the following:
• Your name and UCID #
• For Web Server: The complete server code and the screen shots of your client
browser, verifying that you actually receive the contents of the HTML file
from the server.
• For UDP Pinger: Python file for your client and the screenshots of the output
of the client