I am trying to implement a method which a client behind a NAT can reach my video/audio encoder device connected to another LAN (behind another NAT), and then my device streams Video and Audio to that client.
Is there anyone who knows how to deal with NAT issue for P2P communication?
I have read and review the UDP hole punching, STUN/TURN/ICE and a few other methods like uPnP protocol and so on. All of them either have uncertainty in transmission or it's different from NAT to NAT or it is complicated to be implemented on my device.
I am wondering if there is a simpler method to handle this thing?! Since I have to do networking things on my device, unlike PC, it is not very strong and I can't expect a lot of computation. Thus I prefer a simple method.
Thanks~
The 'easiest' way would be to have 1 device outside both NATs which both devices connect to and acts as a proxy. From the question you are asking, I think this would be an answer to your problem, AND, that you could probably implement.
Related
So I have a PC connected to a micro-controller via a serial cable and an Ethernet cable. Initially the PC sends a byte across the serial cable to the micro-controller. This results in the micro-controller sending back a UDP datagram via the Ethernet cable.
I want to know whether the code running on my PC should be a server or a client?
Per Wikiepdia Client/Server:
The server component provides a function or service to one or many
clients, which initiate requests for such services
And Master/Slave:
Master/slave is a model of asymmetric communication or control where
one device or process controls one or more other devices or processes
and serves as their communication hub
The above scenario looks like the Master/Slave. In the initial, 'idle' case, there is no "SERVER" that is waiting ("listening") for requests. Only when the PC activate the micro-controller they will start communication (via UDP).
You could use either term depending on what you were talking about. As other people have noted, client and server are terms used to describe how distinct parties are involved in a service. The terms can be useful in some situations (e.g. a web server and the browser as a client) but in other situations it's a less useful term (e.g. peer-to-peer protocols).
Presumably you're on stackoverflow because you're dealing with code.
In this case it's useful to be more precise and I'd suggest using terms to match whatever primitives are exposed by your language. Most will use/expose Posix sockets as their standard API, and hence you'd want to talk about/use connect or accept (potentially after binding first). Note that these calls work across TCP and UDP (except accept), but the semantics of sending and recving on the resulting connected sockets will obviously be different.
Per http://www.solacesystems.com/blog/kernel-bypass-revving-up-linux-networking:
[...]a network driver called OpenOnload that use “kernel bypass” techniques to run the application and network driver together in user space and, well, bypass the kernel. This allows the application side of the connection to process many more messages per second with lower and more consistent latency.
[...]
If you’re a developer or architect who has fought with context switching for years kernel bypass may feel like cheating, but fortunately it’s completely within the rules.
What are the functions needed to do such kernel bypassing?
A TCP offload engine will "just work", no special application programming needed. It doesn't bypass the whole kernel, it just moves some of the TCP/IP stack from the kernel to the network card, so the driver is slightly higher level. The kernel API is the same.
TCP offload engine is supported by most modern gigabit interfaces.
Alternatively, if you mean "running code on a SolarFlare network adapter's embedded processor/FPGA 'Application Onload Engine'", then... that's card-specific. You're basically writing code for an embedded system, so you need to say which kind of card you're using.
Okay, so the question is not straight forward to answer without knowing how the kernel handles the network stack.
In generel the network stack is made up of a lot of layers, with the lowest one being the actual hardware, typically this hardware is supported by means of drivers (one for each network interface), the nic's typically provide very simple interfaces, think recieve and send raw data.
On top of this physical connection, with the ability to recieve and send data is a lot of protocols, which are layered as well, near the bottem is the ip protocol, which basically allows you to specify the reciever of your information, while at the top you'll find TCP which supports stable connections.
So in order to answer your question, you most first figure out which part of the network stack you'll need to replace, and what you'll need to do. From my understanding of your question it seems like you'll want to keep the original network stack, and then just sometimes use your own, and in that case you should really just implement the strategy pattern, and make it possible to state which packets should be handled by which toplevel of the network stack.
Depending on how the network stack is implemented in linux, you may or may not be able to achieve this, without kernel changes. In a microkernel architecture, where each part of the network stack is implemented in its own service, this would be trivial, as you would simply pipe your lower parts of the network stack to your strategy pattern, and have this pipe the input to the required network toplevel layers.
Do you perhaps want to send and recieve raw IP packets?
Basically you will need to fill in headers and data in a ip-packet.
There are some examples here on how to send raw ethernet packets:
:http://austinmarton.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/sending-raw-ethernet-packets-from-a-specific-interface-in-c-on-linux/
To handle TCP/IP on your own, i think that you might need to disable the TCP driver in a custom kernel, and then write your own user space server that reads raw ip.
It's probably not that efficient though...
Can someone possibly explain (within the size of a stackoverflow answer) the code required in order to emulate a network interface? I just know that there is virtualization software out there like Qemu that does this specific type of hardware emulation, but have no idea how this would work. Lots of books will show you how to create a program that listens on a TCP socket, but not create a host that gets its own IP address.
VirtualBox is open source. As a VM, with networking support, it should be sufficient to demonstrate to you what to do, along with a working implementation. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
It's really depends what do you mean and what do you want to achieve. If you want emulate some real hardware you need via hypervisor's primitive emulate the most aspects mentioned in datasheet of corresponding adapter, if you want introduce some service, e.g. DNS or HTTP service visible in internal network: you need port teach some user land stack (e.g. LWIP or Slirp, or part if you need UDP only or lower) to communicate with hypervisor's internal network.
I believe that my question is:
Is there a simple user-mode TCP stack on PC operating systems that could be used to exchange data over a lossy serial link with a Linux-based device?
Here is more context:
I have a Linux-based device connected via a serial link to a PC. The serial link is lossy so data being sent between the two devices sometimes needs to be retransmitted. Currently the system uses a custom protocol that includes framing, addressing (for routing to different processes within the Linux device), and a not-so-robust retransmission algorithm.
On the Linux device side, it would be convenient to replace the custom protocol, implement SLIP over the serial link and use TCP for all communications. The problem is that on the PC-side, we're not sure how to use the host's TCP stack without pulling in general IP routing that we don't need. If there were a user-mode TCP stack available, it seems like I could integrate that in the PC app. The only TCP stacks that I've found so far are for microcontrollers. They could be ported, but it would be nice if there were something more ready-to-go. Or is there some special way to use the OS's built in TCP stack without needing administrative privileges or risking IP address conflicts with the real Ethernet interfaces.
Lastly, just to keep the solution focused on TCP, yes, there are other solutions to this problem such as using HDLC or just fixing our custom protocol. However, we wanted to explore the TCP route further in case it was an option.
It appears that the comments have already answered your question, but perhaps to clarify; No you can not use TCP without using IP. TCP is built on top of IP, and it isn't going to work any other way.
PPP is a good way of establishing an IP connection over a serial link, but if you do not have administrative access on both sides of the computer this could be difficult. 172.16.x, 10.x, and 192.168.x are defined as being open for local networks, so you should be able to find a set of IP addresses that does not interfere with the network operation of the local computer.
From the point of view of no configuration, no dependencies, comping up with your own framing / re-transmit protocol should not be too hard, and is probably your best choice if you don't need inter-operability. That being said kermit, {z,y,z}modem would provide both better performance and a standard to code against.
Lastly, you may be able to use something like socat to do protocol translation. I.e. connect a serial stream to a TCP port. That wouldn't address data reliability / re-transmission, but it may be the interface you are looking to program against.
I have a Linux application that talks TCP, and to help with analysis and statistics, I'd like to modify the data in some of the TCP packets that it sends out. I'd prefer to do this without hacking the Linux TCP stack.
The idea I have so far is to make a bridge which acts as a "TCP packet modifier". My idea is to connect to the application via a tun/tap device on one side of the bridge, and to the network card via raw sockets on the other side of the bridge.
My concern is that when you open a raw socket it still sends packets up to Linux's TCP stack, and so I couldn't modify them and send them on even if I wanted to. Is this correct?
A pseudo-C-code sketch of the bridge looks like:
tap_fd = open_tap_device("/dev/net/tun");
raw_fd = open_raw_socket();
for (;;) {
select(fds = [tap_fd, raw_fd]);
if (FD_ISSET(tap_fd, &fds)) {
read_packet(tap_fd);
modify_packet_if_needed();
write_packet(raw_fd);
}
if (FD_ISSET(raw_fd, &fds)) {
read_packet(raw_fd);
modify_packet_if_needed();
write_packet(tap_fd);
}
}
Does this look possible, or are there other better ways of achieving the same thing? (TCP packet bridging and modification.)
There were some apps I used years ago to do some TCP/IP packet manipulation for testing a firewall: fragoute and fragtest. Looks like they haven't been touched in years, but they might give you some ideas of what to do in your code.
You might want to consider using a LD_PRELOAD library to hook the functions that it uses to send the data out (send(), write() etc).
That wouldn't involve any kernel messing-around at all.
Another option is to NAT the outbound connections to a local proxy which can read the data, make whatever modifications, and send it all out to the real destination (with some options to prevent it being NAT'd again and going round in circles)
You can use the click modular router. It is a software router implemented entirely in C++. Click allows you to capture packets as they pass through elements in the router where you can modify or collect statistics as needed. As a kernel module, you completely override the linux routing mechanism and as a userland binary you simply get a duplicate (as you mention in your post) of each packet from the interface. Packets can be directed through the Click graph by way of pcap filters and a variety of other mechanisms.
If you are headed down the bridge route, I think this provides the most direct support for what you are looking to do as you can use tun/tap, to/from host or to/from device capture methods as you require.