I am trying to understand the openGraph API by downloading the SocialCafe example (based on a similar tutorial here). I am able to follow most of the steps in theory, but am unable to understand a few aspects:
The tutorial mentions that a link to the application is needed - a link such that facebook can issue an http GET request. If I do not have a web server, can I still run the application? I have seen some tutorials that specify localhost here on SO. Is that the route I must take to be able to have the sample source code reside locally on my machine and still be able to run the app on fb? If so, how do I set it up?
If I need a web server, is there a way I can turn my own machine into one? If so, how do I go about it?
I am coming from a DSP/C/C++ background and have very little web programming experience. Please do let me know in case some more details are needed.
You will need a publicly accessible web server for your development efforts. You can turn your localhost into one if you can get a static IP address from your ISP (pretty rare now-a-days to get one), then buy a domain name and set DNS up to point to your IP. On your computer you will need to install and configure a web server to use that IP and domainname combination. It takes about 48 hours for DNS to propagate the interwebs.
Your best bet it to purchase some web hosting along with a domain name (you're going to need one eventually once your app is out of development). Then you can run your app under a "sub domain" on your main domain (or in a sub folder on your production domain).
Related
I am trying to set up a wireless 'test' box to use on a private club (11,000 acres). The initial tests won't need anything fancy, it will just be checking the visibility of a hotspot from a high-point in the middle of the property. But if it proves to have good visibility, later tests will be (hopefully) promoted by the club and made aware to members. I would like to set up a captive portal to redirect them to a comments page where they can post a quick message if they were able to connect and hopefully say what they think about the idea.
This is going to be going on a raspberry pi running debian wheezy. So the less overhead the better.
Most of the examples I see online of captive portal are based on having an internet connection and/or a NAT scheme set up. I just need a hotspot and a single web-page for these promotional tests. If possible, I would like to trigger any devices capable to suggest or otherwise open a browser to go to the promotional landing page. It would also be nice if some kind of dns masquerading or other mechanism was in place to redirect all browser traffic in the event their device doesn't support a pop-up.
Any help is appreciated.
EDIT 2022/06/05: With further testing and packet sniffing, it turned out that the android versions in question hard code the ip of the google server used for the 'online check' (8.8.8.8). When on an arbitrary IP, it's not looking for requests to 8.8.8.8 and thus it doesn't grab the online-check and won't redirect. If you set the AP to use this address (when not internet connected), the pop-up will usually trigger.
However, this solution is not ideal. Hacking the IP stack to specifically grab that request to 8.8.8.8 is outside my wheelhouse of knowledge. If anyone knows how to do this or has another potential solution, I would be interested in hearing it.
Ok lets say I want to create a connection between my iPhone app and my server (i'd like to try and use GoDaddy servers for this) to server real time location data to users.
I've seen plenty of good stuff online about using sockets, streams, ASIHttpmessage, CFHTTPMessageRef, etc., but what I'm unclear about is how to set up a server that continuously servers real time data to users (I believe you'd need a stream of data going to the user for this, not just a single http request and response). How does one take a host like GoDaddy and run server code on it. I know you can set up a server like this using terminal, but I don't have access to command line or the ability to run this "server program" from my web host as far as I know. Is there software I can download on my cpanel for this? Do I need a virtual private server and different hosting via GoDaddy maybe?
Does anyone know how I can do this or if my understanding of this whole thing is wrong. Please keep in mind I need this real time (or close to). Please, educate me. I really just need a better understanding of how this works.
I am trying to build an application that can inform a user about website specific information whenever they are visiting a website that is present in my database. This must be done in a browser independent way so the user will always see the information when visiting a website (no matter what browser or other tool he or she is using to visit the website).
My first (partially successful) approach was by looking at the data packets using the System.Net.Sockets.Socket class etc. Unfortunately I discoverd that this approach only works when the user has administrator rights. And of course, that is not what I want. My goal is that the user can install one relatively simple program that can be used right away.
After this I went looking for alternatives and found a lot about WinPcap and some of it's .NET wrappers (did I tell you I am programming c# .NET already?). But with WinPcap I found out that this must be installed on the user's pc and there is nog way to just reference some dll files and code away. I already looked at including WinPcap as a prerequisite in my installer but that is also to cumbersome.
Well, long story short. I want to know in my application what website my user is visiting at the moment it is happening. I think it must be done by looking at the data packets of the network but can't find a good solution for this. My application is build in C# .NET (4.0).
You could use Fiddler to monitor Internet traffic.
It is
a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
It's scriptable and can be readily used from .NET.
One simple idea: Instead of monitoring the traffic directly, what about installing a browser extension that sends you the current url of the page. Then you can check if that url is in your database and optionally show the user a message using the browser extension.
This is how extensions like Invisible Hand work... It scans the current page and sends relevant data back to the server for processing. If it finds anything, it uses the browser extension framework to communicate those results back to the user. (Using an alert, or a bar across the top of the window, etc.)
for a good start, wireshark will do what you want.
you can specify a filter to isolate and view http streams.
best part is wireshark is open source, and built opon another program api, winpcap which is open source.
I'm guessing this is what you want.
capture network data off the wire
view the tcp traffic of a computer, isolate and save(in part or in hole) http data.
store information about the http connections
number 1 there is easy, you can google for a winpcap tutorial, or just use some of their sample programs to capture the data.
I recomend you study up on the pcap file format, everything with winpcap uses this basic format and its structers.
now you have to learn how to take a tcp stream and turn it into a solid data stream without curoption, or disorginized parts. (sorry for the spelling)
again, a very good example can be found in the wireshark source code.
then with your data stream, you can simple read the http format, and html data, or what ever your dealing with.
Hope that helps
If the user is cooperating, you could have them set their browser(s) to use a proxy service you provide. This would intercept all web traffic, do whatever you want with it (look up in your database, notify the user, etc), and then pass it on to the original location. Run the proxy on the local system, or on a remote system if that fits your case better.
If the user is not cooperating, or you don't want to make them change their browser settings, you could use one of the packet sniffing solutions, such as fiddler.
A simple stright forward way is to change the comupter DNS to point to your application.
this will cause all DNS traffic to pass though your app which can be sniffed and then redirected to the real DNS server.
it will also save you the hussel of filtering out emule/torrent traffic as it normally work with pure IP address (which also might be a problem as it can be circumvented by using IP address to browse).
-How to change windows DNS Servers
-DNS resolver
Another simple way is to configure (programmaticly) the browsers proxy to pass through your server this will make your life easier but will be more obvious to users.
How to create a simple proxy in C#?
I'm researching how to code an iPhone app that needs to connect to an online service to get data. The online service only provides access to specified IP addresses or ranges, so iPhones won't be able to connect directly, and the request will have to go through a server. I looked into setting up my own forward proxy server (which the service in question are happy with, by the way), which I guess would do the job for most other platforms. Unfortunately the iPhone does not seem to allow configuring a proxy address programmatically. Is there another potential solution for accessing the content from an intermediate server, that would show the online service the IP address of the server, rather than each individual iPhone?
Many thanks
Steve
It appears that using cURL is one way to achieve this. There should be bindings available for Cocoa.
I'll let people know how it goes in the comments.
Steve
I don't know how else to say it so I'm just going to explain my ideal scenario and hopefully you can explain to me how to implement it...
I'm creating an application with the Zend Framework that will be hosted with DreamHost. The application will be hosted on its own domain (i.e. example-app.com). Basically, a user should be able to sign up, get their own domain sampleuser.example-app.com or example-app.com/sampleuser which points to, what looks like their own instance of the app, which is really a single instance serving up different content based on the url.
Eventually, I want my users to be able to create their own domain (like foobar.com) that points to sampleuser.example-app.com, such that visitors to foobar.com don't notice that the site is really being served up from example-app.com.
I don't know how to do most of that stuff. How does this process work? Do I need to do some funky stuff with Apache or can this be done with a third party host, like DreamHost?
Update: Thanks for the advice! I've decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my hosting plan to utilize wildcard subdomains. It's cheaper than I was expecting! I also found out about domain reseller programs, like opensrs.com, that have their own API. I think using one of these APIs will be the solution to my domain registration issue.
Subdomains are easy. In hosting environements, in most cases, apache is configured to catch all subdomain calls below the main domain. You just need to have a wildcard DNS defined, so *.example-app.com are pointed to IP of your server. Then your website should catch all calls to those subdomain names.
Other domains are hard. They need to be configured as virtual hosts in Apache - see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/vhosts/name-based.html - that means it will be difficult to automate that, especially in hosting environement - unless your host gives you some API to do just that (easy and more feasible scenario would be to have a distinctive IP assigned to your website, then you can catch all with your Apache - it's probably possible to configure using your hosting control panel or works out of the box - and then just point DNS servers to your IP).
Then, after you have configured your Apache to point all necessary calls to your website, you can differnetiate application partitions per subdomain in this way:
get the host header from HTTP request
have a database table containing all subdomain names you're serving
make a lookup to that database table to determine instance, or user, id and use it later for filtering data / or selecting a database, if you'll go with a "database per application instance" schema.
Good luck :)