How to find a machine which is nearest in location?

[kapil Gupta]

Hi,
I have a requirement to find a machine nearest to a server machine. The scenario is that I have a process running on different machines in a network. Now my server has to chose one of the process which is nearest to itself. Is is possible to find a machine which is closest using a Java API?
Thanks
Kapil

[William Brogden]

You could exec the "ping" utility with the IP addresses of the candidate machines, capture the text output and look for the shortest time. Here is what I got when pinging a local machine on my network.

>ping 127.0.0.5
 
Pinging 127.0.0.5 with 32 bytes of data:
 
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 127.0.0.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
 
Ping statistics for 127.0.0.5:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms    

Bill

[Edward Harned]

Jini does this. You can specify the distance for your search.

See http://www.jini.org/

[kapil Gupta]

Thanks for your replies.
My application is a kind of asset management service running on a WAN. If a client check-in a file at a location say A, I would like to do some post check-in operations on that file by a process which is running closest to location A. I have no idea about JINI. Does Jini provide some api to get nearest host machine? Will it work over WAN?
Thanks,
Kapil

[pawank gupta]

u can also do it via using HttpUrlconnection

[William Brogden]

u can also do it via using HttpUrlconnection

Wrong! HttpURLConnection is for connecting to HTTP servers via a precise URL, it has nothing to do with the requirement.

[kapil Gupta]

I checked up Jini and could not find any API which finds the nearest machine. There is a concept of location in Jini but that is just a meta data information of a service and has nothing to do with physical distance between two machines in a network.
Regards,

Kapil