This project will give services of translating an IP address to an ATM address.
Stage 1: Each station when it is booted will go to a predefined ARP server and would register there. Each time a station would like to translate an IP address to an ATM address will go to the server to perform that task.
Stage 2: The server will periodically test that all the station that are registered are still alive. Each of the stations will maintain a cache of pairs of IP-ATM addresses, and will invalidate entries after some time.
Stage 3: Will extend to a multi-server environment. If the ARP server receives a request which it does not know how to translate, i.e. not in his network. It will forward it to another ARP server that might know how to do it. The process ends when we reached the desired network and the ARP server there replies either with the ATM address or a message saying that such an IP address does not exists. (You may assume that each ARP server has one default ARP server that it needs to access in case of failure, this ARP server is given at the configuration, and that there are no loops in the pointers.)
Bonus: Change to the case where there may be more than a single default server, and check for loops.
The output of this project is a routine local_gethostbyname_arp.