Messenger/Chat program problem

[Darren Cheong]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forums and i'd just like to post my first question and i hope its not too noobish

I recently completed a chat program where there is a server and clients

the clients send a message to the server and it gets distributed via a multicast socket to the others clients.

Its all working fine on the three windows xp sp2 computers near my cubicle in the office.. but something strange happened when i installed the clients onto the other computers..

somehow most of the other computers, (a combination of windows xp sp2, sp1, and windows 2000) will receive only one message from the multicast socket.. and then it doesn't seem to respond anymore. At first i thought it was some IOException or something but after some testing i realized that there was nothing wrong with the connection but rather.. upon receiving the first message.. the "problem clients" seem to block that port or something because after a minute or so it can receive messages again..

Just to make things simpler i made another small program to listen in on the multicast group again on the 3 pcs that worked earlier, the small program picked up all the messages but on the problem pcs .. the client only picked uup the first message and something else a minute or so later. Just to clarify, this messages that come a minute later are not "late".. For example, lets just say i sent out the message "1" , "2","3" etc one after the other, "1" will display on the client.. but after that 2,3,4,5,6 will not.. amybe after a minute or so when i send "100" it will appear on the client.. but then again it will stop receiving any more messages after this..

I hope someone can help me out and sorry for the very long post.. just wanted to explain everything that i have tried and done.

Regards,

Darren

[Layne Lund]

I'm sorry to see that no one has tried to answer your question yet. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. I am not an expert in network programming; far from it, in fact. I suggest that you try to narrow down the problem. It might help if you can write a small amount of code that recreates the problem. Feel free to post the code here. Although we won't wade through pages and pages of code, we will be glad to look at small snippets.

Please feel free to continue to use this forum as a sounding board.

Regards,

Layne

[Darren Cheong]

hi,
no its ok... thanks very much for replying me


i figured the problem is to do with the poor network quality of my office..
where the data someties doesn't get to where its supposed to.

so instead of using multicast socket.. i rewrote the server to process each input stream from each separate client in separate threads..


But really, thanks a lot for your reply.

Cheers