UDP broadcast problem - c

I'm trying to do something like this. There is one server , and multiple clients in the same subnet. Clients will send something to server and server will send this message back to all the other clients in the subnet. So this looks like broadcast to me. But i never could manage to do this in C.. I'd be glad if you give me an example of this.
EDIT: Well since it is UDP , reliability is not a problem. These computers are in the same network and no packet lost is possible. That program does not recieve messages from other clients. That is what I have to do. Thanks by the way.

You should not use broadcast, but rather multicast. This is used for instance by ghost and other "images disk backup" over network.
I have done it in java with a MulticastSocket sending a DatagramPacket, if you need a test...

[The contents of this post have been moved to the question.]

Related

Can a RAW socket be bound to an ip:port instead of an interface?

I need to write a proxy server in C language on Linux (Ubuntu 20.04). The purpose of this proxy server is as follows. There're illogical governmental barriers in accessing the free internet. Some are:
Name resolution: I ping telegram.org and many other sites which the government doesn't want me to access. I ask 8.8.8.8 to resolve the name, but they response of behalf of the server that the IP may be resolved to 10.10.34.35!
Let's concentrate on this one, because when this is solved many other problems will be solved too. For this, I need to setup such a configuration:
A server outside of my country is required. I prepared it. It's a VPS. Let's call it RS (Remote Server).
A local proxy server is required. Let's call it PS. PS runs on the local machine (client) and knows RS's IP. I need it to gather all requests going to be sent through the only NIC available on client, process them, scramble them, and send them to RS in a way to be hidden from the government.
The server-side program should be running on RS on a specific port to get the packet, unscramble it, and send it to the internet on behalf of the client. After receiving the response from the internet, it should send it back to the client via the PS.
PS will deliver the response to the client application which originates the request. Of course this happens after it will unscramble and will find the original response from the internet.
This is the design and some parts is remained gloomy for me. Since I'm not an expert in network programming context, I'm going to ask my questions in the parts I'm getting into trouble or are not clear for me.
Now, I'm in part 2. See whether I'm right. There're two types of sockets, a RAW socket and a stream socket. A RAW socket is opened this way:
socket(AF_PACKET, SOCK_RAW, htons(ETH_P_ALL));
And a stream socket is opened this way:
socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
For RAW sockets, we use sockaddr_ll and for stream sockets we use sockaddr_in. May I use stream sockets between client applications and PS? I think not, because I need the whole RAW packet. I should know the protocol and maybe some other info of the packet, because the whole packet should be retrieved transparently in RS. For example, I should know whether it has been a ping packet (ICMP) or a web request (TCP). For this, I need to have packet header in PS. So I can't use a stream socket, because it doesn't contain the packet header. But until now, I've used RAW sockets for interfaces and have not written a proxy server to receive RAW packets. Is it possible? In another words, I've the following questions to go to next step:
Can a RAW socket be bound to localhost:port instead of an interface so that it may receive all low-level packets containing packet headers (RAW packets)?
I may define a proxy server for browser. But can I put the whole system behind the proxy server so that packets of other apps like PING may route automatically via it?
Do I really need RAW sockets in PS? Can't I change the design to suffice the data I got from the packets payload?
Maybe I'm wrong in some of the concepts and will appreciate your guidance.
Thank you
Can a RAW socket be bound to localhost:port instead of an interface so that it may receive all low-level packets containing packet headers (RAW packets)?
No, it doesn't make sense. Raw packets don't have port numbers so how would it know which socket to go to?
It looks like you are trying to write a VPN. You can do this on Linux by creating a fake network interface called a "tun interface". You create a tun interface, and whenever Linux tries to send a packet through the interface, instead of going to a network cable, it goes to your program! Then you can do whatever you like with the packet. Of course, it works both ways - you can send packets from your program back to Linux through the tun interface, and Linux will act like they just arrived on a network cable.
Then, you can set up your routing table so that all traffic goes to the tun interface, except for traffic to the VPN server ("RS"), which goes to your real ethernet/wifi interface. Otherwise you'd have an endless loop where your VPN program PS tried to send packets to RS but they just went back to PS.

How do apps like LogMeIn and TeamViewer work?

There's already a question How exactly does a remote program like team viewer work which gives a basic description, but I'm interested in how the comms works once the client has registered with the server. If the client is behind a NAT then it won't have its own IP address so how can the server (or another client) send a message to it? Or does the client just keep polling the server to see if its got any requests?
Are there any open source equivalents of LogMeIn or TeamViewer?
The simplest and most reliable way (although not always the most efficient) is to have each client make an outgoing TCP connection to a well-known server somewhere and keep that connection open. As long as the TCP connection is open, data can pass over that TCP connection in either direction at any time. It appears that both LogMeIn and TeamViewer use this method, at least as a fall-back. The main drawbacks for this technique are that all data has to pass through a TeamViewer/LogMeIn company server (which can become a bottleneck), and that TCP doesn't handle dropped packets very well -- it will stall and wait for the dropped packets to be resent, rather than giving up on them and sending newer data instead.
The other technique that they can sometimes use (in order to get better performance) is UDP hole-punching. That technique relies on the fact that many firewalls will accept incoming UDP packets from remote hosts that the firewalled-host has recently sent an outgoing UDP packet to. Given that, the TeamViewer/LogMeIn company's server can tell both clients to send an outgoing packet to the IP address of the other client's firewall, and after that (hopefully) each firewall will accept UDP packets from the other client's Internet-facing IP address. This doesn't always work, though, since different firewalls work in different ways and may not include the aforementioned UDP-allowing logic.

packet retransmission

I have a scenario where multiple clients connect to a TCP server. When any of the clients sends a packet to the server, the server is supposed to have a retransmission timer and keep sending that packet to another server until it receives a reply. How do I go about setting up this retransmission mechanism? I'm doing this on Linux in C.
If you use a TCP socket, retransmit will happen automatically. Admittedly, if you want more control, you'll need to use UDP and handle the retransmit yourself.
I'm guessing this is an assignment. I had something similar where our channel was purposefully being corrupted.
I would suggest you follow something similar.
Send packet.
start a timer.
if an ACK (acknowledgment) is not received within a certain amount of time, then go back to step 1.
IIRC, the location of the files that contain these TCP config parameters are distro-dependent. They are in different folders on Red Hat and Ubuntu.

how to bind a server to different ports instead of a sing le one?

i am writing a tcp server code to monitor tcp/ip traffic coming to my system.
Can anyone have the idea about how to bind to different tcp ports,instead of a single port.
or can anyone ve the idea about how to do it?
expecting ideas from alll good hearts
Take a look at libpcap, it's closer to what it sounds like you need.
For each port you are listening on you need to prepare the data structures required to bind to that port and listen on it. You cannot listen on ALL ports -- unless you work at driver level and intercept the packets before they are dispatched to the application listening on a port. So effectively, if you will, inside your app, you will start multiple servers -- one for each port -- but once you have acquired a client connection you can share the same code for all requests coming on all ports (you are listening to).
You'd need to create one socket per port you want to bind. But how this will help you to "monitor tcp/ip traffic coming to your system" I am not sure. Probably it won't.

Behind NAT to behind NAT connection

I've come across an interesting problem. Basically I have 2 mobile phones that are both behind NATs. I want to communicate directly between the 2 devices using UDP.
I know if I initiate a connection from the phones to a server then I can push data back down that connection to the phone (ie send it back from the same port that received the message to the same ip and port that it was received from). So I can easily communicate between the 2 devices by connecting both phones to the server. Then sending data to the server and having it re-routed back to the phones. This bypasses any NAT traversal issues I may come up against.
However I would rather just use the server to point the 2 devices at each other and then let them communicate directly. How would I go about doing this? Is it possible without using something like uPnP?
Any help would be much appreicated!
Edit: I found this document http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/p2pnat/ It looks like hairpin translation is what I'm after but it doesn't look to be widely supported. I wonder how good mobile ISP's support for UPnP is?
What you're looking for is UDP hole punching, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching
The basic idea is simple, you tell each endpoint the ports to use, and they start sending udp packets. The NAT'ing devices will set up a traversal rule when they see the first outgoing packet, and then the next attempt from the other end will match this traversal rule.
You need a mediator server, so the clients can tell where they are. Then one opens a server by uPNP, and the other connects to it.

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