First, I want to give thanks for that amazing lib! I love it. A client is connecting himself to a server. The server should save the IP and do stuff with it later on (I really need the IP). I found that answer: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2010-September/006381.html but I don't understand how I get the IP out of the message (a XREP)... I think I am only able to read the ID, but the IP is managed internally by 0MQ. His second solution suggests to send the IP as part of the message, but I don't understand how to get the "public"-IP. I found that post: Get TCP address information in ZeroMQ
is pass bind a service to an ephemeral port, get a full connection endpoint ("tcp://ipaddress:port")
I don't get how this works. Does he mean something like a web-service?
In my opinion, it would be best to get the IP out of 0MQ (it has the IP already). I would even adjust 0MQ for that, if somebody could point to the place where the IP is saved, couldn't find it. The socket types are not that important, at the moment. I would prefer smth REQ-REP like. Thank you!
Summary:
TL;DR answer to your question is: you can't get IP address of the peer that sent a message, using ZeroMQ API.
Explanation:
ZeroMQ does not expose peer IP address because it is irrelevant for the message based communication that ZeroMQ is designed for. When it is possible for ZeroMQ to get IP address of client that is connecting to server (in example using method described here), it is useless. For a longer explanation here is how it works inside ZeroMQ and any other server implementation.
Server side of the connection does not handle connected clients by the means of the hashtable that maps IP to client, but by keeping track of connected "sockets" (socket descriptors) - when a server accepts (using accept()) a connection, it receives from operating system socket descriptor to use to communicate with connected peer. All server has to do is keep that descriptor around to read() from and write() to that client. Another client that connects to server receives another socket descriptor.
To summarize: even if ZeroMQ would be able to provide you with IP of connected peer, you should not depend on it. ZeroMQ hides from you connection management so you can focus on messaging. Connection management includes reconnections, which may result in a change of IP without changing the actual ZeroMQ socket connected on the other side.
So here's an example of why you might want to get the ip address a message was delivered from: we have a server whose job it is to synchronize updates onto occasionally-connected clients (think mobile devices here, though this is an extreme example of a mobile deivce.)
When the mobile unit comes onto the network, it sends a list of it's firmware files to the server via a dealer-router connection. The server has a list of all applicable firmware files; if the client needs an update it will initiate an update via a separate mechanism.
Since the IPs for the devices can (and do) change, we need to know the IP address associated with the mobile device FOR THIS CONNECTION, i.e. right now.
Yes, we absolutely can have the client send it's IP address in the message, but that's a waste of another n bytes of valuable satellite air time, and while not pure evil, is sure annoying. Zmq already has this information, if it didn't have it, it wouldn't be able to generate replies. The address is in the socket data, there's no reason the message couldn't (optionally, for all you guys who use wired networks and think disconnects are the exception) include a reference to the socket structure so you can get the address out of it. Other than pedantic religiosity, which is far too common in zmq.
The way ZeroMQ is designed there's no information provided on the remote IP. As far as I know you have to manage this through your application by sending that information as a message of some sort.
The messages themselves use an IP-agnostic ID which has more to do with the instance of ZeroMQ running than any particular interface. This is because there may be more than one transport method and interface connecting the two instances.
Related
I am trying to write a simple client-server application where a client can send or broadcast a message to one or all clients in the network. The server stores all IP addresses that are connected to it, and broadcasts a new IP if a new client connects itself.
I'm not quite sure how to implement the sending of a single message to another client. Would I just have to send a TCP message to the server and put the desired recipient as data in the TCP layer which is then extracted by the server so it knows where to send it?
I also want to add encryption to the messages which would then no longer allow the server to read the data, so I'm not sure how to solve that!?
I am using c++ and Qt5 for the implementation
I'm not quite sure how to implement the sending of a single message to
another client. Would I just have to send a TCP message to the server
and put the desired recipient as data in the TCP layer which is then
extracted by the server so it knows where to send it?
In an ideal world, the clients could talk to each other directly, since they could find out the IP addresses of the other clients from the server (either via its broadcast or by requesting a list of IP addresses from the server). If all of your clients are running on the same LAN, that can work well.
Assuming you want your system to run on the general Internet, however, that won't work so well, since many/most clients will be behind various firewalls and so they won't accept incoming TCP connections. (There are some ways around that, but they require a very advanced understanding of how TCP works, and even then they only work in certain situations, so I don't recommend attempting them in a first project)
Therefore, for a reliable client->client messaging mechanism, your best bet is indeed to have the sending client send the message to the server, along with some short header that tells the server which other client(s) the message ought to be forwarded to. My own client/server messaging system works along these lines, and I've found it to work well.
I also want to add encryption to the messages which would then no
longer allow the server to read the data, so I'm not sure how to solve
that!?
Don't worry about adding encryption until you've got the basic non-encrypted functionality working first, since encryption will make things much more difficult to debug. That said, it's perfectly possible to pass encrypted/opaque data to the server, as long as the aforementioned header data (which tells the server where to forward the message to) is not encrypted (since the server will need to be able to read the header to know what to do with the encrypted data). The trickier part will be when the receiving client gets the forwarded data from the server -- how will the receiving client know how to decrypt it? You'll need some external mechanism for clients to share keys (either symmetric keys or public/private keypairs), since if you sent the encryption keys themselves through the server, there wouldn't be much point in encrypting anything (since the server could retain a copy of any keys it forwarded, and use them to decrypt, if it wanted to)
I'll start by saying that currently my server identifies based on sender IP, that is the IP of the client.
Now I am programming a game server (just for practice) and this got me thinking how do I uniquely identify a client if they are on the same IP. (Two players open a connection on the same machine / same network so the outward IP is the same).
I've searched for an answer both on google and here and gamedev.net but am unable to find what I am looking for, likely because I do not know the correct terms to query for.
Any guidance on this would be appreciated, especially in regards to efficiency and best practice.
Thanks.
There is no "connection" term in all stuff related to UDP, but it is common that an application that initiates a UDP socket maintains the same source port over the time, so you could identify it by source IP-port.
There is some stuff related to maintain communication between a client inside a NAT router (in NAT-UDP the client is the first host that send a UDP datagram to another host and trigger a new connection tracking entry) and a server.
This "connection tracking" is only for allow traffic from outside to inside, making a "temporal" relationship (with a timeout), that probably will not be used anymore (only once) sometimes.
If the server doesn't use the same destination port in outcoming datagram as source port in incoming one, the router won't send the datagram to the host inside NAT.
Best regards.
I read similar posts here, but no one is really helpfull, so I ask same for Windows.
On server side we create ad-hoc network and connect to it using ad-hoc api, on client side we get enumeration of all available ad-hoc networks and connect to proper one.
Now on server side we just create listening socket, we don't need to specify any ip address.
But on client side we must know server ip address to create connection socket.
I know that socket layer is independent from higher level (ad-hoc), but it's not the answer. The goal: get ip address of server that created ad-hoc network on client that is currently connected to that network. I don't want to use other libraries like managed wi-fi.
Maybe there is some win api function to get list of ip addresses associated with ad-hoc network, some ip address range? I don't quite understand all specifics (and hardly will do, considering education process), so just point me in right direction. The language is not the matter, may it be C# or C++.
Thanks.
Using C++ I create a single UDP socket, supplying both an IPv4 address and port. I run this on Ubuntu and have both a wlan0 and eth0 interface up and running. Apparently something decides that both interfaces should be used, I appreciate that. Sending and receiving using a different interface does create a kind of a pickle (NAT traversal???) for me though. Using Wireshark I can see packages coming in, but my application does not register them.
To clarify:
I have a tracker which will supply me with a peer. The tracker will also contact that peer to send me a message. In order to overcome NAT traversal issues, I will send a puncture message.
The problem now is that the puncture messages is sent over wlan (I am testing locally with two machines), whereas the messages from the peer are coming in over eth.
So, I think the simplest solution would be to simply use one interface. (Or both one socket)
EDIT:
I will try what is mentioned here on specifying a single interface.
#Barmar, pointed out that UDP sockets may change interface when sendto is called with a destination address that would benefit from it.
I am still fuzzy on the reason for my problem though. Can someone explain why this is an issue in the first place?
EDIT2:
The above mentioned solution of forcing one interface for the socket bind did not work. Apparently the sendto method will choose to ignore this and still go for the other interface if it feels that that will work better.
Does anyone know how to make sure that socket sticks to the interface it was assigned to?
If you need to ensure that UDP replies come from the same address that the request was sent to, the solution is to use multiple sockets. You open one socket for each IP of the server (this may be more than one socket per interface, because of interface aliases), and bind the socket to that IP. Then you use select() or poll() to wait for requests on all sockets at once. When a request comes in on a particular socket, you send the reply out through that same socket, and its source IP will match the original packet's destination.
I'm writing client-server application and I need my server to find all clients in some network. I've already found some info here: Discovering clients on a wifi network, but I still don't understand how to implement this. Maybe somebody can say where I can find some code examples.
Thanks in advance.
PS. Working on c++, windows.
Generally TCP/IP is used as a communication protocol between client and server. For Windows platform Winsock library is used to implement TCP/IP. The server binds and listens on a port for incoming connections. Just like a webserver like stackoverflow listens by default on port 80 and then client (browsers) connects to it.
Here is a link to start. Here is sample
Normally all the client connects to server which listens on a well defined port. The server is only one hence the IP address and port is well know to all the client and hence they can connect to it.
In you case you want your server to have ablity to discover all the clients in the network. To achieve this the server needs to broadcast to network some message. The client will receive this message and will respond to the server that they are available on such IP and they can connect to server or provide additional information to server. Normally instead of broadcast, multicast is used which is limited broadcast. All the clients and server will subscribe to the multicast group which is a special kind of IP address. When server send a message to this multicast address all the client, which are subscribers of this address will receive this message and can respond back. Here is a sample
Edit: you can also use boost lib to implement multicast: sender eg., receiver eg.