# Simple local network messaging

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/simple-local-network-messaging/167362>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [May 7, 2009, 2:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/simple-local-network-messaging/167362 "2009-05-07T02:07:46Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![veveve](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9bcb4/32.png) [@veveve](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/veveve)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2009, 2:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/simple-local-network-messaging/167362/1 "2009-05-07T02:07:46Z")

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Hi, I’m fairly new to Ruby and programming and I’m working on building a  
very simple application to send text messages over a local network. I’m  
fairly confident I can work out the messaging side of things, Ruby’s  
socket classes seem fairly straight forward. 🙂

My early prototype had one program to send messages and one to recieve  
them but I was wondering if someone could give me a suggestion on how to  
do both. Where I’m suck is getting the program to constantly let the  
user type things into it while updating the messages as they are  
recieved. I’m doing this purely as a command line application as I don’t  
want to make the code overly complicated with a GUI programing.

My early prototype worked fine sending messages to ‘localhost’ but when  
I tried to send them to a local IP or hostname it seemed to send them  
alright but the remote machine did not recieve them. I was using UDP to  
do this however I am thinking about converting it to a TCP socket  
instead.

I’m hoping to get a few suggestions in regards to the logic order of the  
program. I’ve been looking for sample code of programs using the TCP  
socket class but I’ve been pretty unsuccessful so far I’m pretty sure  
that’s because I’m googling badly but if anyone has some examples I  
could look at that would be helpful.

Regards,  
Adam

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![veveve](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/v/e9bcb4/32.png) [@veveve](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/veveve)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2009, 4:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/simple-local-network-messaging/167362/2 "2009-05-07T16:49:44Z")

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try to disable firewall on your client machines, if that solves the  
problem,  
you need to poke a hole in your firewall to let the UDP communication  
come  
in.

2009/5/6 Ve Mcmillan [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)