I don't have my own web server. Is it possible to write a bot that will fill out a webpage form without a server? If not, can I use my localhost to do it? What are my [free] options?
It is indeed possible, you can just run the bot using your own machine as a server, as long as it has an internet connection. The only catch with this is that you'll obviously have to keep your machine on and connected to keep the bot running.
I'm not exactly sure what your trying to do, but you can use XAMPP to host a local server on your computer.
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i have a problem with local network connection. i'm writing an iphone application and i need to read/write files to a computer. Both devices connected on the same network.
if it's possible, i want to get connected computers ip list, select one of them and read/write files like pdf, doc, txt etc.. if it's not possible to do, i will write the computer ip which i want to connect. There is no problem, both of solution is OK.
But i dont know what do i do after get the computer's ip ?
i found this chat client/server on local, but i got it very complicated.
Anyone have any idea about this ?
You'll need to have a server running on the computer, which can show files and allow for files to be read and created.
Easiest is to run a webdav service on the computer, Apache provides the mod_dav module for this purpose.
The iPhone app then becomes the client. I'd suggest using neon for this purpose. It's a C library that provides listing, reading and writing files on a remote webdav server.
That's how I would do it.
1) Find the network address of the computer you want to connect to. For this you can make use of Bonjour. It's very easy to setup because Bonjour handles the resolving of address for you.
You just have to publish a service (e.g. _myprotocol._tcp) via the ´NSNetService` class which is available on iOS and OS X (Windows too)- in your case you would publish the service on your computer.
Then you search for the service with the NSNetServiceBrowser class.
When you found a service you can then resolve it. This actually gives you the network name of the other device.
2) Connect to the other device via a tcp socket. The CocoaAsyncSocket library is very good at this. This project also includes some examples. One example already provides a bonjour server and client implementation.
i found exactly what i want. The solution is here
So I've tested this particular example on my local machine:
http://bjorngylling.com/2011-04-13/postgres-listen-notify-with-node-js.html
It worked! So now when I update a specific table, and am running my node.js file(from the tutorial) -I get an instant notification on my Terminal(mac)!! cool!
But how do I implement this onto a client's browser??
First of all, in the node.js script you'll notice that I have to connect to the database with my username and password:
pgConnectionString = "postgres://username:pswd#localhost/db";
I obviously can't have that floating around in the .js file the user's browser downloaded.
Plus I don't even know what scripts I'd have to include in the <head>. I can't find anything anywhere on how this is used in the real world.... All I see are neat little examples you can use in your command line.
Any advice, or guidance in the right direction would be awesome! Thanks.
You can't.
Node.js runs directly on your server, speaking directly to the native libraries on that machine. I'm not sure exactly what the postgres driver you are using does, but either it speaks to the postgres libraries OR it speaks directly with sockets on the local or a remote database server.
Neither of these methods can be used directly from a browser environment (it can't speak directly to the native libraries and it can't speak "raw" sockets).
What you can do is to have the web client speak to your own server process on a server (running node.js or similar), which would then speak to the database on behalf of the client.
Assuming you also need to database server to be able to initiate notifications to the client, you would need to use a bi-directional communication module like socket.io or similar.
You can do: combine your JS running on node.js which accesses Postgres listening for events with a node.js based WebSocket server, implement PubSub and push out to HTML5 browsers .. WebSocket capable ones.
Another option: use a generic WebSocket to TCP bridge like https://github.com/kanaka/websockify and implement the Postgres client protocol in JS to run in browser. That is doable, but probably not easy / for the faint hearted.
I have written a small client server socket application. It is a proof of concept for some socket programming that I want to apply to a much bigger project.
For the moment I want to user wireshark to analyse the traffic that goes between them. They are both running on my local machine.
I have installed a loopback interface, and have tried to use wireshark with it.
No joy. Any ideas?
I have successfully analysed traffic between my machine and other machines no problems.
I have had a look here,
http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/Loopback
And I am not using the address 127.0.0.1 which they mention saying you can't capture traffic on 127.0.0.1
Thanks.
You might try creating a virtual machine to run your application and using wireshark on it.
Save yourself some grief and download Microsoft Network Monitor.
As good as Wireshark is on Unixen, Windows is a "special" case :)
I need to develop a server side application that opens sockets and manages communication with multiple clients. Previous answers have told me this is possible using a single script file, which loops forever.
Is this possible using only a PHP/Perl/Python hosting service? or would I need a VPS or shell access?
Any help is appreciated since I've never worked with sockets before. Thanks for your time.
Cheap Perl/PHP hosting services don't want you running your own long-running processes.
This means you will need a VPS (which obviously includes shell account since you can do anything you want on your private server). A few VPS providers might block outgoing IRC port but I think that is rare.
Linode and Slicehost/Rackspace are just two examples very very well run VPS service providers and I guarantee you can run your own socket application on them.
It would make your host very unhappy since their CPU time is valuable! If you use shared hosting, your host might just kick you out for such a solution! (Read your contract for the fine details.)
I think it could be possible but it depends on the setup of your host, plus the permissions your host are granting you. And most will be unhappy about anything that runs forever. (They prefer to see just short, simple applications.)
Usually the service firewall will block any unexpected ports, or if they are not doing it now they will start doing it after they figure out what you are doing and decide they don't like it.
I would say no because it involve too much security problems
Recently we got a new server at the office purely for testing purposes. It is set up so that we can access it from any computer.
However today our ip got blocked from one of our other sites saying that our ip has been suspected of having a virus that sends spam emails. we learned this from the cbl http://cbl.abuseat.org/
So of course we turned the server off to stop this. The problem is the server must be on to continue developing our application and to access the database that is installed on it. Our normal admin is on vacation and is unreachable, and the rest of us are idiots(me included) in this area.
We believe that the best solution is to remove it from connecting to the internet but still access it on the lan. If that is a valid solution how would this be done or is there a better way? say blocking specified ports or whatever.
I assume that this server is behind a router? You should be able to block WAN connections to the server on the router and still leave it open to accepting LAN connection. Or you could restrict the IPs that can connect to the server to the development machines on the network.