Ethernet- lan communication

[Altera_Forum]

Hello everyone, i'm fairly new with my development board and I was wondering.. 

 I have an Altera DE2 and I want to be able to communicate with it through a network, I don't seem to be able to find any examples on how to do anything with it, all I need to do is send and receive a string of characters, any suggestions on how to do this? or any suggestions on network libraries to program and use the ethernet port on the board?  any help is appreciated, thanks a lot --- edit:  By the way my intention is to be able to write some C or C++ code to catch and manipulate the string of characters I was talking about, I've only used the board with quartus and im trying to figure out how to set everything up to use NIOS II

[Altera_Forum]

you can take a look at the "Full-Featured Nois II Hardware Design Example at http://www.altera.com/support/examples/nios2/exm-full_nios2_hardware.html for the hardware. For the software you can use the "Simple socket server" template design in the Nios IDE as a starting point. 

 Christoph