Help with Select? - c

So i'm trying to make a server that listens on multiple ports.
I'm having trouble getting my head around select.
Could someone give me a little bit of pseudo code around the order I do things and why.
I get that i bind two separate sockets to different ports. Sure. But then can I just call listen on both ports?
On my client(s), do i just call connect, and listen will notice the connection attempt? How do i choose to accept it?
Sorry for the novice questions. I've tried beejs guide and a few others, but they don't really cover multiple ports very well (they all seem to use the same example).
Thanks!

After calling bind and listen on the server, the fd for the socket is just another fd that you can use with the select call. When select returns and indicates data on that fd, you can call accept on the fd to begin receiving data.
Edit: Also, the fd you receive when you accept the connection is another fd that can be passed to the select call.

Client Side:
you need only to call the connect.
Server side the steps are more or less the following:
create the socket
Bind the socket
Start listening
Add file descriptor of the listening socket to the select
When the select return on the listening socket then call the accept function upon it. It will return another file descriptor(remember to add this new file descriptor to the list of the FD for which the select has to return through FD_SET)

Related

EVFILT_WRITE returning twice

I'm trying to send a buffer to my socket client when the file descriptor is available for writing.
EV_SET is set to: EVFILT_WRITE, EV_ADD | EV_DISABLE | EV_CLEAR
then when changed to EVFILT_WRITE, EV_ENABLE then EVFILT_WRITE get triggered once which is great!
but if i use the function write or send when i get EVFILT_WRITE like this:
if (e->filter == EVFILT_WRITE)
send(socket, buff, strlen(buff), 0);
then i get again another EVFILT_WRITE event. It seems like the send function trigger another EVFILT_WRITE event. is that expected behaviour? I thought EVFILT_WRITE triggers only when the file descriptor is available for writing.
I searched for the issue, but it looks like nobody mention that. Can someone please confirm if that is expected behaviour and why?
This is how I understand it:
Since you used EV_CLEAR, the kevent facility starts to return state transitions, not the current state. So, whenever you touch the socket descriptor with kevent() or send() calls, you get an EVFILT_WRITE event back.
Another way to look at this:
When send() is called the descriptor becomes unavailable for writing for a moment and then again becomes available, which is why you get an event.
I'll try to loop in some knowledgeable people to this question.

send() before recv()

i have two projects: one is a client and one is a server.
lets say the server as to send 2 messages one after the other to the client.
the client code is like this:
while(1)
{
recv(acceptedStr, socket);
printf("%s\n, acceptedStr);
*other code lines*
}
while the server code is like this:
while(1)
{
send(socket, "First String");
send(socket, "Second String");
*other code lines*
}
if there is no TIME_OUT for the second send, will the recv of the client get "Second String"? or does he have to make sure that he is in a recv before the server send?
No, the receiving end does not need to have an recv active for the send to work.
Once a connection is established, the data is buffered by the OS network stack. And recv will succeed once data has arrived and send will succeed if the data was delivered to the network stack of the receiver.
Answer to your question
Yes, That is enough and your code will work. But if you want to extend it more, or if the server and the client need to be at sync at all times, do continue reading.
Sync of server and client
Do read this if you want synchronous operations of server and client.
I have previously worked with send and recv and one thing that I would suggest you is that you always alternate the recv and send in complementary ways. As an example
Server:
send()
recv()
send()
.
.
.
Client:
recv()
send()
recv()
.
.
.
This usually gets tiring to keep track of. (I think the return send from a entity on recv is called ack).
But, at some point you would like to turn the flow of events. For this, you can just send and recv some random data.
I had previously written a wrapper around send and recv for a project of mine. Feel free to check it out: https://github.com/ArenaGrenade/Simple-FTP-Server/blob/main/utils.cpp. (Its pretty well documented, so even if you did not understand my explanation you would understand the one in code.)
Let me know if you understood by marking mine as an answer. Happy to help! If you have doubts just comment below. :)
The client does receive the Second String, but it does not work as you think it should.
I created the client and server through the two official samples:Complete Winsock Client Code and Complete Winsock Server Code
I modified the sample so that the server only sends data and the client only receives data.
When I try to send data twice in a row, the client will receive the following content:
You can see that the client does receive Second String, but because you keep sending these two data, it will cause problems in the picture.
Because the data is being sent continuously, the client will also receive the data sent multiple times at one time, and save them to the same buffer, although only part of it is displayed (because it is truncated by'\0'), but It can be seen from the size of the buffer that the data sent multiple times is received at one time.And the content received later will be unpredictable

SSL_do_handshake() get stuck

in my code i call SSL_do_handshake() function.
Everything works fine if the server gets the "right" messages.
BUT, for security issues I tried sending a dummy message. just "hello" to the right port and the right ip address.
in this case, SSL_do_handshake() gets stuck forever.
I want the function to return in that case, so that my server will not get stuck.
What are the options ?
I read about setting bio to non-blocking..
I added to my code :
BIO_set_nbio(bio, 1); before the connection is established..
but it didn't do thew work...
What can I do ?
BIO_set_nbio sets only the flag, that the bio should be considered non-blocking. You have to actually make the socket itself non-blocking.

Can I Send to Socket and receive from it in the same place in C

I have a dll written in C.
I would like to send data to a socket and receive the answer in the same function.
e.g.:
BOOL SendToSocketAndRecv(...)
{
// ...
send(...);
retval = recv(...);
// ...
}
In another word, my dll should not follow Client Server pattren.
Is this possible ?
any help ?
Thank you - Khayralla
Yes
You may work in either blocking (synchronous) or non-blocking (asynchronous) mode. Depending on this you may or may not send more data before you receive something from the peer.
"Stream" sockets (like TCP) are "tunnels". If the peer sends several packets you may receive them in a single call to recv, and vice-versa - a sinle "message" from the peer may take several calls to recv. Hence you should read the message in a loop.
You have a lot to learn about network programming.
I am sending a commands to Robot and then wait to get answer
Yes, what you have will work.
But things start to get interesting when you factor in the chance that the robot will not respond for whatever reason. Then you need to provide for a timeout on the response. Soon other things start to creep in. For example, you may not want to be stuck in the read for the duration of the wait, because you may need to service other events (user input or other sources) as they comes in.
A common architecture to handle this is to use select() and make it the hub of all your incoming events. Then you drive a state machine (or machines) off these events. You end up with an event driven architecture. It would look something like this:
while(true)
{
select(fds for event sources, timeout);
if (timeout)
{
call robot state machine(timeout);
continue;
}
iterate through fds
{
if (fd has data)
{
read data into buf
if (fd is for robot)
{
call robot state machine(buf)
}
else if (fd is for source1)
{
call source1 state machine(buf)
}
...
}
}
}
In this model, sends can be done from anywhere in the code. But you wind up sitting in the select() after, waiting for events. Also, you will have to figure out the details of doing the correct timeout and select in general, but there is enough of that out there.
Yes this is both possible and legal. The API itself isn't concerned about being used from the same function.
not only is this possible, it is a classic coding idiom for a client in a client server system. Usually the function is called something like ExecuteRequest

Is Socket.SendAsync thread safe effectively?

I was fiddling with Silverlight's TCP communication and I was forced to use the System.Net.Sockets.Socket class which, on the Silverlight runtime has only asynchronous methods.
I was wondering what happens if two threads call SendAsync on a Socket instance in a very short time one from the other?
My single worry is to not have intermixed bytes going through the TCP channel.
Being an asynchronous method I suppose the message gets placed in a queue from which a single thread dequeues so no such things will happen (intermixing content of the message on the wire).
But I am not sure and the MSDN does not state anything in the method's description. Is anyone sure of this?
EDIT1 : No, locking on an object before calling SendAsync such as :
lock(this._syncObj)
{
this._socket.SendAsync(arguments);
}
will not help since this serializes the requests to send data not the data actually sent.
In order to call the SendAsync you need first to have called ConnectAsync with an instance of SocketAsyncEventArgs. Its the instance of SocketAsyncEventArgs which represents the connection between the client and server. Calling SendAsync with the same instance of SocketAsyncEventArgs that has just been used for an outstanding call to SendAsync will result in an exception.
It is possible to make multiple outstanding calls to SendAsync of the same Socket object but only using different instances of SocketAsyncEventArgs. For example (in a parallel universe where this might be necessay) you could be making multiple HTTP posts to the same server at the same time but on different connections. This is perfectly acceptable and normal neither client nor server will get confused about which packet is which.

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