FIX (quickfix) how to set which NIC/IP to use for the FIX session - quickfix

I am about to write a trading application using the FIX protocol (QuickFix for C++). The computer has 6 NIC card configured. How do I let my FIX application (acting as an initiator in the case) to use one particular NIC card (IP address) of the all 6 available? The initiator setting only let me set the target host/port, not source IP/port.
And, how to let it use 2+ NIC cards simultaneously (for load balancing purpose) within the same application?
thank you

Initiator only needs to know of the IP address with which it needs to connect. How should a packet reach that IP is the job of the lower network layers and the kernel network stack.
Regarding 2+ NICs, that should be handled by the kernel routing table or the routers, which come along the way.

You can setup specific routes in your routing table.
Example:
route add -host gw
Where is IP address of the target machine to which you want to connect to.
is the IP address of one of NIC you want to use.
Thus it will use that NIC card for quickfix session.
Hope this helps.

Related

How is data shared across ip address

I'm not sure I've phrased the question correctly but I'll explain a bit more.
I have a server running on a virtual machine on PC1. I can access this through a particular IP address on the same computer.
Now on a different PC2, when I try the same IP address I see the content served by PC1's server. Both computers are on the same network.
I don't really understand how that IP address is serving the same info on PC2. I'm not sure of the mechanics in the background either and it would really help if someone could explain what's happening here.
If you are using a wifi network then it is because of it you can access the content of the server you have created.
You can see the architecture as that of the internet but on a small scale. Your IP addresses are stores in the wifi (routing tables) so that it can send packets accordingly (See hoping and packet transmission). To be precise, each and every individual system maintains a routing table in it. Thus, in order to fetch a particular site, a system sees its routing table. If the particular IP address is present, the router returns it and the system shows that page. On the contrary, if the IP address is not present the router asks the nearby systems/servers for that particular IP address and the phenomenon continues till the IP address is found.
So, when you search for a local server via system B, whose data is in system A, then the router requests all its child systems to search for the particular IP address in their routing tables, and thus you can access the local server via systems connected on the same network.
To add furthermore, since the local servers are known to be locally operated, the router just sends the seek requests to its child systems only and not globally.
I have tried to keep it as simple as possible supposing that you have not learned about computer networks yet.

Is there an ethernet link layer protocol to get remote IPv4 settings?

Given one or more embedded devices of the same type with some unknown IPv4 addresses or maybe no IPv4 addresses set at all: is there any Ethernet based network protocol to ”find“ those devices in the local net (LAN) from remote (PC) and get their IPv4 settings?
What not works for me:
ARP: IP address must be known or only finds device I communicated with before (or ugly ARP floods …)
LLDP: point to point only (?), so I would only see the switch between device and me. Also, just announces, no response on request (because there are no requests). Further: asking the switch (which supports LLDP) through SNMP is no option when using dumb switches
IP based protocols: I played with UDP and broadcasts (both as request and response), but that does not work reliably if device and me are on different subnets, and it does not work at all if device has no IPv4 set.
DHCP: does not work in networks without DHCP server, maybe no DHCP client on the embedded device
I assume others had the same problem before, take manufactures of network equipment like access points which should be configured remotely, powerline adapters, switches … all those where the vendor gives you some proprietary tool, the device shows up like magic in a list and you can assign some IPv4 then.
Of course the device must have some daemon listening and responding to certain requests, but what would be a standard protocol for such a task? Or do I have to make up some new protocol for that? May some of the above mentioned is possible, but I overlooked something?
Ethernet only provides a layer 2 connection, so anything Ethernet-based can't ever work across a router (ARP, LLDP - LLDP doesn't even cross a decent switch as it's link layer only).
Depending on the network, routed multicasts or directed broadcasts could work - normally they don't. All vendor tools I've seen just use (Ethernet) broadcasts and don't work across routers.
Most often, simple DNS is used for this purpose - the device registers with the DNS server or is preregistered and you just resolve the name.
Edit: without the router problem, the simplest way is to use a UDP broadcast to some unused port. With DHCP unavailable, the device could fall back to zeroconf (169.254.0.0/16) and broadcast from there.
Without IP, you'd need a "raw" Ethernet socket and use an Ethertype that doesn't interfere with normal network operations.

How to forward traffic from one IP to another IP address

We have two identical servers A and B in our office. These two servers are synced together in all aspect. That's if some changes take place in one server then it will take effect in another server. This has been done to minimize the downtime. Now server A has a public IP address (X.X.X.X) form one ISP. Server B has a public IP address(XX.XX.XX.XX) from a different ISP. Now for some reason IP address X.X.X.X goes down. Now How can we automatically forward traffic to another IP address so website will not go down?
You're basically asking about high availability, you'd have a third server (called load balancer) in front which would sent traffic to either server based on their status. Have a look at a simple setup in here.
can you use DNS-level fail over using https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns-failover.html

How to let different processes use different network interfaces?

I'm on the client side. There're multiple network interfaces. How can I let different processes use different network interfaces to communicate? Since I want to connect to the same server, routing seems not working here. Also, connect() doesn't have arguments to specify local address or interface as bind() does.
If your goal is to increase bandwidth to the server by using multiple network interfaces in parallel, then that's probably not something you can (or should) do at the application level. Instead, you should study up on Link Aggregation and then configure your computer and networking stack to use that. Once that is working properly, you will get the parallelization-speedup you want automatically, without the client application having to do anything special to enable it.
"The bind() system call is frequently misunderstood. It is used to
bind to a particular IP address. Only packets destined to that IP
address will be received, and any transmitted packets will carry that
IP address as their source. bind() does not control anything about the
routing of transmitted packets. So for example, if you bound to the IP
address of eth0 but you send a packet to a destination where the
kernel's best route goes out eth1, it will happily send the packet out
eth1 with the source IP address of eth0. This is perfectly valid for
TCP/IP, where packets can traverse unrelated networks on their way to
the destination."
More info e.g. here.
That's why you probably misunderstand bind() call.
The appropriate way to bind to physical topology (to some specific interface) is to use SO_BINDTODEVICE socket option. This is done by setsockopt() call.
Source Policy Routing might be helpful.
Try the following steps:
Use iptables to give packets from different process with different marks.
Use iproute2 to route packets with different marks to different table.
In different table, set the default route to different uplink.
The whole process require certain amount of understanding about linux networking.
Here is an example shows how to route all traffic for a user through one specific uplink: http://www.niftiestsoftware.com/2011/08/28/making-all-network-traffic-for-a-linux-user-use-a-specific-network-interface/
You could try follow similar approach by running different process with different user and route traffic from one user to one uplink.
Also you could let processes communicate with the server with different port and mark the traffic by port.

Coordinating peer-to-peer messages using multicast, how to get receiving IP?

I have been working on a local LAN service which uses a multicast port to coordinate several machines. Each machine listens on the multicast port for instructions, and when a certain instruction is received, will send messages directly to other machines.
In other words the multicast port is used to coordinate peer-to-peer UDP messaging.
In practice this works quite well but there is a lingering issue related to correctly setting up these peer-to-peer transmissions. Basically, each machine needs to announce on the multicast port its own IP address, so that other machines know where to send messages when they wish to start a P2P transmission.
I realize that in general the idea of identifying the local IP is not necessarily sensible, but I don't see any other way-- the local receiving IP must be announced one way or another. At least I am not working on the internet, so in general I won't need to worry about NATs, just need to identify the local LAN IP. (No more than 1 hop for the multicast packets is allowed.)
I wanted to, if possible, determine the IP passively, i.e., without sending any messages.
I have been using code that calls getifaddrs(), which returns a linked list of NICs on the machine, and I scan this list for non-zero IP addresses and choose the first one.
In general this has worked okay, but we have had issues where for example a machine with both a wired and wifi connection are active, it will identify the wrong one, and the only work-around we found was to turn off the wifi.
Now, I imagine that a more reliable solution would be to send a message to the multicast telling other machines to report back with the source address of the message; that might allow to identify which IP is actually visible to the other machines on the net. Alternatively maybe even just looking at the multicast loopback message would work.
What do you think, are there any passive solutions to identify which address to use? If not, what's the best active solution?
I'm using POSIX socket API from C. Must work on Linux, OS X, Windows. (For Windows I have been using GetAdapterAddresses().)
Your question about how to get the address so you can advertise it right is looking at it from the wrong side. It's a losing proposition to try to guess what your address is. Better for the other side to detect it itself.
When a listening machine receives a message, it is probably doing do using recvfrom(2). The fifth argument is a buffer into which the kernel will store the address of the peer, if the underlying protocol offers it. Since you are using IP/UDP, the buffer should get filled in with a sockaddr_in showing the IP address of the sender.
I'd use the address on the interface I use to send the announcement multicast message -- on the wired interface announce the wired address and on the wireless interface announce the wireless address.
When all the receivers live on the wired side, they will never see the message on the wireless network.
When there is a bridge between the wired and the wireless network, add a second step in discovery for round-trip time estimation, and include a unique host ID in the announcement packet, so multiple routes to the same host can be detected and the best one chosen.
Also, it may be a good idea to add a configuration option to limit the service to certain interfaces.