Socket programming via two network interface simuntaneoulsy - sockets

I want to have two tcp connection in a single machine via socket programming, But this two connection should connect to two different network interfaces. One is say my 3g dongle and the other is wifi modem. But is it possible for a single machine(OS) to have two connection active at a time? If possible how to program the tcp connection via socket programming?

This can definitely be done, if you just create two programs and run each of them, they will both be able to communicate over their respective network. When you run a program, the operating system creates a process dedicated to running that program, which is assigned time on the CPU by the scheduling algorithm in the OS. So long as your CPU can keep up with any processing associated with the networks, they will both be able to run simultaneously.
You make no mention of your plans for this, but be aware that I/O times can also limit your speeds. If you're using an older computer, it may not be able to transmit a lot of data very quickly due to an out-dated (or just low powered) network card.
Next time try to research your question first, information about this can be found with relative ease using any popular search engine, including the search bar at the top of this page. Also read this, or one of the other several help articles about asking questions well, that are available from the page you had to go through before asking the question.

Related

How can I automatically test a networking (TCP/IP) application?

I teach students to develop network applications, both clients and servers. At this moment, we have not yet touched existing protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, etc. The students write very simple programs on top of the plain socket API. Currently I check a students' work manually, but I want to automate this task and create an automated test bench for networking applications. The most interesting topics for testing are:
Breaking TCP segments into small parts and delivering them with a noticeable delay. A reason I need such test is that students usually just issue a read/recv call and process the received data without checking that all necessary data was received. TCP doesn't guarantee the message boundaries, so in certain circumstances it is necessary to make several read/recv calls. The problem is that in most simple network applications (for example, in a chat application) messages are small and fit into the single TCP segment, so the issue doesn't appear. My idea is to artificially break messages into several small TCP segments (i.e. several bytes of data) so the problem will appear.
Pausing the data transfer for some time to simulate multiple slow clients and check that the multithreading/async sockets are implemented properly in the students' servers.
Resetting a connection in random moments of time.
I've found several systems which simulate a bad network (dummynet, clumsy, netem). Hovewer, they all work on the IP level of the stack, so OS and it's TCP implementation will compensate the data loss. Such systems are able to solve the task number 2, but they are not able to solve tasks 1 and 3. So I think that I need to develop my own solution, which will act as a TCP proxy. My questions are:
Maybe the are any libraries or applications which can (at least partially) solve the given tasks, so I'll be able to use them as a base for my own solution?
In case there is none any suitable existing software projects, maybe there are any ideas and approaches about how to do this properly?
From WireShark mailing list - Creating and Modifying Packets:
...There's a "Tools" page on the Wireshark Wiki:
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Tools
which has a "Traffic generators" section:
https://wiki.wireshark.org/Tools#Traffic_generators
which lists some tools that might be useful...
The "Traffic generators" chapter also mentions another collection of traffic generators
If you write your own socket code, you can address all 3 tasks.
enable the socket's TCP_NODELAY option (disable the Nagle Algorithm for Send Coalescing) via setsockopt(), then you can send() small fragments of data as you wish, optionally with a delay in between (see #2).
simply put a delay in between your send() calls.
use setsockopt() to adjust the socket's SO_LINGER and SO_DONTLINGER options to control whether closing the socket performs an abortive or graceful closure, then simply close the socket at some random interval after the connection is established.

Is it hard to code in Perl a network analyzer if you scan the whole network instead of a single switch?

May I ask this question for experienced programmers in Perl and knows a thing or two about network programming. Here's the thing, We have a program to develop in Perl about network analyzers, our scope is that we only scan traffic passing through the switch where the host is connected to, will it be difficult if we scan the whole network instead of only one switch? Me and my team are wondering if this will take a lot of time in coding it, or maybe it will only take up one line of code, something like that. I hope my question is clear. Thanks in advance.
That's not a problem of Perl, but how you get the data to the machine where your analyzer runs. Usually you will only get data for the local machine when using a switch (except for ARP requests), so you need get access to a specifically configured port of the switch (mirror port). To get access to all the data in the network you either need to be connected to all the mirror ports of all switches in the network, have special devices to collect all traffic (network tap) or create some kind of sensor network to accumulate data from various places.
Apart from that I would not use Perl for high-speed network analysis (which is usually needed if you want to analyze data from the whole network). Even with C it is not simple to do a fast capture and Perl introduces too much overhead. But you might use Perl for the analysis of a reduced dataset, e.g. after doing lots of filtering on the original data.

How Does Applications know which Internet Data is theirs?

This Morning I Booted my Computer and Had multiple applications needing an update. While I was waiting for the applications to update, a question came to mind which I thought I'd ask in here.
The question is How does each application known which internet data being retrieved is theirs?
The applications don't even care about it, they let the Kernel sort out that information.
When an application establishes a connection with a remote computer, the Kernel assigns that application a local port, which is a number among 0-65535. This port on the receiving end can either be requested by the application or the kernel will assign a random port. Generally there is only one application per port, however it is possible for multiple applications to receive the same data, though this is rare.
When a packet is received by the network interface, the kernel will sort the packet by its destination port. There will be a table in the kernel mapping ports to processes, and each application will receive the relevant data without caring about any other possible data that could be coming in the computer.
If you are a programmer, you can learn about all this stuff by reading about socket programming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_socket
is a good place to start. You can also google "socket programming" with your preferred programming language to get an idea of how this is set up on the programming end.

simulate server load with BSD sockets

I'm using blocking TCP sockets in C and I want to simulate a high load on the server when there are many simultaneous connections and then I want to measure the time necessary to access the server via a browser during this high load time (the server understands HTTP headers).
Also each client request ends fast (sends a HTTP header - gets text).
How do I do this (without crashing my local machine -> I tried using fork to make many clients; also, I have a virtual machine too).
If anyone has an idea or some general directions about how to do this, it would mean a lot.
Edit: I need to run this with my own client, which uses a modified version of the OpenSSL library to connect to my SSL/TLS server, so I can't use external test tools.
I want to know how to build the client and the server. I don't know too much about other sockets than the blocking ones, I'm just skimming through the UNIX Network Programming book of Richard Stevens, but I was wondering if anyone could point out the exact solution.
Thank you !
The easiest resolution to this would be to download an existing stress testing framework such as fwptt ( http://fwptt.sourceforge.net/ ).
If you want to implemennt your own stress testing framework, I'd suggest you lose the blocking nature of your code and go with a parallel design that will scale beautifully. The limiting factor is pretty much your CPU then.
Having two physical servers would be ideal, so that then your stress test isn't affecting the CPU (and therefore the response times) of the server. Also that VM of yours drains up precious CPU time.

How to sync an application state over multiple iphones in the same network?

I am developing an iPhone application that allows to basically click through a series of actions. These series are predefined and synced with a common configuration server.
That app might be running on multiple devices at the same time. All devices are assumed to have the same series of actions defined on them. All devices are considered equal, there is not a server and multiple clients or something like that.
(Only) one of these devices is used by a person at any given time, it is however possible that the person switches to a different device at any given time. All "passive" devices need to be synchronized with the active one, so that they display the same action.
The whole thing should happen as automatically as possible. No selection of devices, configuration, all devices in the same network take part in the same series of actions.
One additional requirement is that a device could join during a presentation (a series of actions) and needs to jump to the currently active action.
Right now, I see two options to implement the networking/communication part of that:
Bonjour. I have implemented a working prototype that can automatically connect with one (1) other device in the network and communicate with that. I am not sure at this point how much additional work the "multiple devices" requirement is. Would I have to open a set of connections for every device and manually send the sync events to all of them? Is there a better way or does bonjour provide anything to help me with that? What does Bonjour provide given that I want to communicate with every device in the network anyway?
Multicast with AsyncUdpSocket. Simply define a port and send multicast sync events out to that port. I guess the main issue compared to using bonjour with tcp would be that the connection is not safe and packets could be lost. This is however in a private, protected wlan network with low traffic if that would really be an issue. Are there other disadvantages that I'm not seeing? Because that sounds like a relatively easy option at this point...
Which one would you suggest? Or is there another, better alternative that I'm not thinking of?
You should check out GameKit (built in to iOS)--they have a lot of the machinery you need in a convenient package. You can easily discover peers on the network and easily send data back for forth between clients (broadcast or peer to peer)
In my experience Bonjour is perfect for what you want. There's an excellent tutorial with associated source code: Chatty that can be easily modified to suit your purposes.
I hobbled together a distributed message bus for the iphone (no centralized server) that would work great for this. It should be noted that the UI guy made a mess of the code, so thar' be dragons there: https://code.google.com/p/iphonebusmiddleware/
The basic idea is to use bonjour to form a network with leader election. The leader becomes the hub through which all the slaves subscribe to topics of interest. Then any message sent to a given topic is delivered to every node subscribed to said topic. A master disconnection simple means restarting the leader election process.