I am trying to write a programme that will 'listen' to application that is running on a port over TCP/IP.
When I point my browser to localhost:30003 , I get the output stream from the application printed to the screen. It would appear that the browser successfully 'listens' to the port.
What is happening here? Is my browser polling the application or is the application pushing tcp data which the browser picks up?
I am not sure whether to get this data I need to create a client or server instance.
One of the best ways to find out what is actually happening is to fire up Wireshark and follow the tcp stream.
http://www.wireshark.org/
Alternately, you can use something like TCP mon if you only care about the text, and none of the networking details.
http://ws.apache.org/commons/tcpmon/download.cgi
Based on the limited information in your question, the most likely thing is that the browser makes the tcp connection, and you send back a malformed response. The brower assumes you are a broken site, and does it's best to adjust. If you aren't sending the correct http header, it dosn't know what else to do so it probably just puts the text on the screen.
Best way to know the details is with wireshark or tcpmon
Pointing the browser to localhost:30003 will cause it the open the connection to port 30003 on the localhost and sent the string "GET /" to request a web page from what is thinks is a web host. Whatever text is sent by your app upon receiving a connection is simply displayed by the web browser as if it had received the contents of a text file on a web server.
when you write "localhost:30003" in your browser a connection is established to some program that listens to the port 30003 on your computer. The prefix in the URL, (default HTTP) determines the protocol used by server and client, in this case the browser is the client connecting to your PC, the server.
If you want to do the same with your program you can set up a socket connection to your localhost using the same port 30003. Your program then becomes the client. Depending on the program (which you don't mention anything about) you may have more protocol options and would need to handle the protocol in your program.
An alternative is to use telnet to connect to your program but it depends on available protocols.
Related
I have a website being served from a custom webserver, and it loads and works fine when loaded from a laptop/desktop browser, but loads inconsistently on mobile browsers. (In my case I tested specifically Samsung Internet and Chrome on Android)
(The exact behaviour is: load the web page, refresh, and then after a couple of refreshes it will sometimes not be able to load a background image, or any resource on the page at all - but only on mobile browsers)
In case this was just some cached data issue, I've cleared all browser data, restarted my phone, asked friends to try on their devices etc, but I've only been able to reproduce this on mobile devices.
My web server is written using liburing, nginx as a reverse proxy, though I doubt that would be the issue
I read Can Anyone Explain These Long Network Stalled Times? and it ocurred to me that an issue could be me using multiple different HTTP requests to get resources (I've not implemented Connection: Keep-Alive), but I also get this issue on WiFi, and I get the issue even when loading a single asset (such as a background image)
Additional possibly relevant info:
I was initially having a similar issue on desktop as well, and I fixed it by using shutdown() before calling close() on the HTTP requests
I'm using the following response headers:
Keep-Alive: timeout=0, max=0
Connection: close
Cache-Control: no-cache
I'm using the following socket options:
SO_REUSEADDR (mainly for debug convenience)
SO_REUSEPORT (sockets in multiple threads bind to and listen on the same port)
SO_KEEPALIVE, TCP_KEEPIDLE, TCP_KEEPINTVL and TCP_KEEPCNT (to kill off inactive clients)
Oddly enough though I think this disappears for a while after restarting my phone
I have tried not using nginx, instead using WolfSSL for TLS, and I get the same issue
I am inclined to think that this could be an issue with what headers I'm setting in responses (or possibly some HTTPS specific detail I'm missing?), but I'm not sure
And here's the actual site if anyone wants to verify the issue https://servertest.erewhon.xyz/
It looks to me like your server does not do a proper TLS shutdown, but is simply shutting down the underlying TCP connection. This causes your server to send a RST (packet 28) when the client is doing the proper TLS shutdown by sending the appropriate close notify TLS alert (packet 27).
This RST will result in a connection close on the client side. Depending on how fast the client has processed the incoming data this can result in abandoning still unread data in the TCP socket buffer, thus causing the problems you see.
The difference in behavior between mobile and desktop might just be caused by the performance of the systems and maybe by the underlying TCP stack. But no matter if the desktop works fine - your web server behaves wrong.
For details on how the connection close should happen at the HTTP level see RFC 7230 section 6.6. Note especially the following parts of this section:
If a server performs an immediate close of a TCP connection, there is
a significant risk that the client will not be able to read the last
HTTP response. If the server receives additional data from the
client on a fully closed connection, such as another request that was
sent by the client before receiving the server's response, the
server's TCP stack will send a reset packet to the client;
unfortunately, the reset packet might erase the client's
unacknowledged input buffers before they can be read and interpreted
by the client's HTTP parser.
To avoid the TCP reset problem, servers typically close a connection
in stages. First, the server performs a half-close by closing only
the write side of the read/write connection. The server then
continues to read from the connection until it receives a
corresponding close by the client, or until the server is reasonably
certain that its own TCP stack has received the client's
acknowledgement of the packet(s) containing the server's last
response. Finally, the server fully closes the connection.
I understand why a server would need sockets for incoming data, but I do not understand why it is necessary that a socket connecting to another computer needs a source port.
While others have mentioned the exact reason why, let me illustrate the point by giving you an example:
Say you want to ssh to your server. OK, you ssh in and do some stuff. Then you tail a log file. So now you don't have access to the console anymore. No problem you think, I'll ssh again...
With one port number, if you ssh again that second connection will be a mirror of the first since the server won't know that there are two connections (no source port number to tell the difference) so you're out of luck.
With two port numbers you can ssh a second time to get a second console.
Say you browse a website, say Stackoverflow. You're reading a question but you think you've seen it before. You open a new tab in your browser to stackoverflow to do a search.
With only one port number the server have no way of knowing which packet belongs to which socket on the client so opening a second page will not be possible (or worse, both pages receive mixed data from each other).
With two port numbers the server will see two different connections from the client and send the correct data to the correct tab.
So you need two port numbers for client to tell what data is coming from what server and for the server to tell what data is coming from which socket from the client.
A TCP connection is defined in terms of the source and destination IP addresses and port numbers.
Otherwise for example you could never distinguish between two connections to the same server from the same client host.
Check out this link:
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/basiccomputerarchitecture/g/computer-ports.htm
Ultimately, they allow different applications and services to share the same networking resources. For example, your browser probably uses port 80, but your email application may use port 25.
TCP communication is two-way. A segment being sent from the server, even if it is in response to a segment from the client, is an incoming segment as seen from the client. If a client opens multiple connections to the same port on the server (such as when you load multiple StackOverflow pages at once), both the server and the client need to be able to tell the TCP segments from the different connections apart; this is done by looking at the combination of source port and destination port.
I'm working on a Windows Phone 8 app (game). In the app, I need to be able to start a TCP/IP connection with another phone (lobby match-up), and then send messages to and from, without a centralized server. I am currently following this tutorial, however, I need connect to another Windows Phone, not a server. Is this possible without a centralized server? If so, how might I go about doing it? If not, would I be better off using PeerFinder or some other P2P type connection finder?
Alternatively, could I find another phone using PeerFinder and set up a socket connection there?
I guess in essence, my question is: what are the alternatives/what are my options if I want to connect to another Windows Phone, but without a central server?
First of all sorry about my English.
Most probably you can use wifi for the work.its not good enough to make a program that is always listening to a port. Because it makes a security hall. So it is better to open the TCP port only when you need it also make it to manual as much as possible.
To connect two phones together you can follow the following procedure.
First of all you need to specify a conmen TCP port for the all users
INITIAL HANDSHAKING
Make sure that relevant application is running on both mobile phones.
Make the application to auto on wifi when it's initiating it self.
Make a button call "Search for users".
when user click it open a specific TCP port which is unique for the application.
then search for the open wifi connections.
send a TCP packet for the selected port which you set for the application and wait for the acknowledgement.
List all the connections who sent the acknowledgement (Available application users).
SELECT A USER
Enable user to select one of the user from available list
Then send a TCP request to selected user.
Receiver can accept or reject it
by accepting it user make his/her TCP end point to IP that sends data.
Then you can simply transfer the data via opened port.
its better if you can allocate list of TCP ports to use. then you can write an algorithm to select another when one is allocated by another program.
I think this will be useful for you.
I'm trying to spec out the foundations for a server application who's purpose will be to..
1 'receive' tcp and/or udp packets
2 interpret the contents (i.e. header values)
To add more detail, this server will receive 'sip invites' and respond with a '302 redirect'.
I have experience with Net::Pcap and perl, and know I could achieve this by looping for filtered packets, decoding and then using something like Net::SIP to respond.
However, there's a lot of bloat in both of these modules/applications I don't need. The server will be under heavy load, and if I run TCPDUMP on it's own, it loses packets in the kernel due to server load, so worry it wont be appropriate :(
Should I be able to achieve the same thing by 'listening' on a socket (using IO::Socket for example) and decoding a packet?
Unfortunatly by debugging, it's hard to tell if IO::Socket will give me the opportunity to see a raw packet? And instead it automatically decodes the message to a readable format!
tl;dr: I want to capture lots of SIP Invites, analyse the head values, and respond with a SIP 302 redirect. Is there a better way than using tcpdump (via Net::Pcap) to achieve this?
Thanks,
Moose
Is there a better way than using tcpdump (via Net::Pcap) to achieve this?
Yes. Using libpcap (that's what you meant instead of tcpdump in that question) is a bad way to implement a TCP-based service, as you will have to reimplement much of TCP yourself (libpcap gives you raw network-layer packets), and the packets your program gets will also get delivered to the Internet protocol stack on your machine, so:
if there's nothing on your machine listening on the TCP port to which the other machines are trying to connect, the connection requests will get a RST from the TCP code and think the connection attempt failed;
if there is something on your machine listening on that port, it'll probably accept the connection, and it and your program will both try to communicate with the other machine, which will probably confuse its TCP stack and cause various bad and random things to happen.
It's not much better for UDP:
if there's nothing on your machine listening on the UDP port to which the other machines are trying to connect, the connection requests will probably get an ICMP Port Unreachable message from the UDP code, which may make it think the connection attempt failed;
if there is something on your machine listening on that port, it'll probably accept the connection, and it and your program will both try to communicate with the other machine, which will probably confuse its SIP stack and cause various bad and random things to happen.
IO:Socket will probably not give you raw packets, and that's a good thing; you won't have to implement your own IP and TCP/UDP stack. If your goal is to implement a redirect server on your machine, you have no need to receive raw packets; you want to receive SIP INVITEs with all the lower-level processing done for you by your machine's IP/TCP/UDP stack.
If you already have a SIP implementation on your machine, and you want to act as a "firewall" for it, so that, for some INVITEs, you send back a 302 redirect and prevent the SIP implementation on your machine from ever seeing the INVITEs in question, you will need to use the same mechanism that your particular OS uses to implement firewalls. There is no libpcap-like wrapper for those mechanisms, as far as I know.
When the webbrowser control issues an HTTP request to a URL, it is assigned a port - which is utilized for the length of that connection.
Is there away to find out which port is being utilized for each connection the webbrowser control establishes/issues?
Every request is potentially using a different port. Since most requests are resolved in a couple of seconds and then closed, having the port information on the client isn't going to be very helpful.
If you're interested from a historical perspective, you can add the port number to the logs that many web servers generate.
In order to view this information live you can use a tool such as TCPView
Now for the real question. What are you trying to do? There may be an easier way.
you can run in background:
netstat -bn
and parse output to get information about your application (ports, ips, etc.)