Finally

Sorry for dumping network terminology on you when we may not yet have covered networking!

In my examples, I used the loopback address 127.0.0.1 to get around Windows Firewall and the security restrictions. If you can run these programs on two or more virtual machines, it is a much better way to test things. I am a big fan of Raspberry Pi, and I will often use a rack of these for testing. Many of my production instrumentation systems end up on a Raspberry Pi or similar.

This code is based on functions I have used for years for testing client-server applications. Around 2013 I started writing code to control automation infrastructure; think about all the things that are required in the electrical and cooling parts of a data centre.

This code has been incrementally improved, but always with the goal of keeping it as simple and stable as possible. I made all sorts of excursions into multithreaded code and that all worked. I also did versions based on object-oriented code. I want to keep things as simple and reliable as possible, the code demonstrated here works fine.

LLDP

When connecting up systems, its really nice to be able to detect which port a device is on, where it is on a network. By enabling LLDP on any system, this information can propagate. Take a look here, this is the repo of one of our research collaborators.