Project 2 - Community Panic Alert System

by Fiona Eguare & Santosh Venkataraman (Group 13)

This README contains the setup, compilation and testing guidelines for our project 2 submission. In short, our idea is to provide a service that allows civilians to alert those around them if they feel that they are in danger. This program is written in C and makes use of basic C libraries as listed below. Enjoy!!!

Specifications

• This program must be run in WSL or on an Ubuntu machine
• WSL 1 is required to run this program across multiple devices on Windows
• CC or GCC compiler needed

Libraries

The libraries required to run this program are as follows:

• stdio.h
• stdlib.h
• string.h
• unistd.h
• arpa/inet.h
• pthread.h

How to Setup

• This program will come set up to be run in up to 6 terminals on one device, thus all hosts recorded in the tracker will have the local host IP address
• If you wish to run this program with multiple devices as hosts you must edit the IP addresses in the tracker file to the IP addresses of the host machines
  • To retrieve the IP address of a device run the command " hostname -I " in the WSL/ Ubuntu terminal
• If you wish to change the number of hosts, simply edit the tracker.txt file, adding or removing entries, but maintaining the formatting (Port IP\n)
  • ensure there is a new line after the last entry
• If you wish to differentiate between each hosts message, edit the string assigned on line 46 before compiling each host. This is not necessary

How to Compile

• This program can be compiled like any standard C program using pThreads
• Ensure you are in the right directory, have all necessary libraries
• For CC: cc -o panic project2.c -pthread
• For GCC: gcc -o panic project2.c -pthread

How to Test

• When running the program, ensure to provide the hosts port number and the hosts IP address as arguments (in this order)
  • For example: ./panic 12000 127.0.0.1
• Port numbers can be randomly selected but must match those selected in tracker.txt and must be paired with the same IP addresses
• Each host can only broadcast 1 message before being restarted as this suits the use of the program
• The program will keep running until you close it from the terminal (shift + c) so it can keep listening for alerts, as this suits the use of the program
• When all hosts are running, each terminal should look like this:

  [+] Creating receiver thread
  [+] Creating sender thread
  
  

• At this point you can input 'PANIC' into any one of the terminals and press enter
• This will broadcast a placeholder alert message to all hosts on the network
  • If you wish to personalise this message to each host see the last point in How to Setup
• terminal outputs starting with [-] indicate errors

References

1. YouTube video by Idiot Developer - File Transfer using UDP Socket in C | Socket Programming
2. Beej's Guide to Network Programming by Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall, February 11, 2023
3. Pthreads implemented as taught in module CSU23016-202223 Concurrent Systems And Operating Systems by Andrew Butterfield