Perl Net::SSLeay check if socket is available to read - perl

Question

I am using a perl module called Net::APNS::Persistent. It helps me to open up a persistent connection with apple's apns server and send push notifications through APNS. This module uses Net::SSLeay for ssl communication with APNS server.
Now, I want to read from my socket periodically to check if APNS sends back any response. Net::APNS::Persistent already has a function called _read() which looks like below:
sub _read {
my $self = shift;
my ($socket, $ctx, $ssl) = #{$self->_connection};
my $data = Net::SSLeay::ssl_read_all( $ssl );
die_if_ssl_error("error reading from ssl connection: $!");
return $data;
}
However, this function works only after APNS drops the connection and I get error while trying to write. On other times my script gets stuck at,
my $data = Net::SSLeay::ssl_read_all( $ssl );
I checked Net::SSLeay doc and found it has a method called peek
Copies $max bytes from the specified $ssl into the returned value. In contrast to the Net::SSLeay::read() function, the data in the SSL buffer is unmodified after the SSL_peek() operation.
I though it might be useful, so I added another function within the Net::APNS::Persistent module:
sub ssl_peek {
my $self = shift;
my ($socket, $ctx, $ssl) = #{$self->_connection};
print "Peeking \n";
my $data = Net::SSLeay::peek( $ssl, $pending );
print "Done peeking \n";
return $data;
}
Unfortunately this also gave me the same problem. It only prints Peeking and never reaches the line where it would print Done peeking. Had same problem using Net::SSLeay::read. Is there a way to check if the socket can be read or maybe set a read timeout so that my script doesnt get stuck while trying to read from socket?

Answer 1

The APNS documentation says the following:
If you send a notification that is accepted by APNs, nothing is returned.
If you send a notification that is malformed or otherwise unintelligible, APNs returns an error-response packet and closes the connection. Any notifications that you sent after the malformed notification using the same connection are discarded, and must be resent
As long as your notifications as accepted, there won't be any data to read and thus a read operation on the socket will block. The only time there's data available is when there's an error, and then the connection is immediately closed. That should explain the behaviour you're observing.

Answer 2

To check if the underlying socket can be read use select, i.e.
IO::Select->new(fileno($socket))->can_read(timeout);
timeout can be 0 to just check and not wait, can be a number of seconds or can be undef to wait forever. But before you do the select check if data are still available in the SSL buffer:
if (Net::SSLeay::pending($ssl)) { ... use SSL_peek or SSL_read ... }
Apart from that it does look like that the module you use does not even attempt to validate the servers certificate :(