dynamic pool of process C - c++

I'm writing program in UNIX on C. I have to write client-server(TCP) program on sockets. Client sends some information and server answer. No matter what client sends or receives because I successfully wrote code for it. But last part of task is very hard for me.
1)One connection - one child process.
2)For new connections using pre-running processes from a pool.
3)Pool size is dinamic.If the number of free processes(which is not servicing client) became less than N - should create new processes, if it became more than K - "extra" processes must be terminated.
This is my code. Every connection make new child process using fork().Each connection runs in new process. But how to make dynamic pool that I said above?
Please, help, it's very important! This is the last what I should do.
Server Code:
int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
int cfd;
int listener = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); //create listiner socket
if(listener < 0){
perror("socket error");
return 1;
}
struct sockaddr_in addr;
addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
addr.sin_port = htons(PORT);
addr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
int binding = bind(listener, (struct sockaddr *)&addr, sizeof(addr));
if(binding < 0){
perror("binding error");
return 1;
}
listen(listener, 1); //listen for new clients
signal(SIGCHLD,handler);
int pid;
for(;;) // infinity loop on server
{
cfd = accept(listener, NULL, NULL); //client socket descriptor
pid = fork(); //make child proc
if(pid == 0) //in child proc...
{
close(listener); //close listener socket descriptor
... //some server actions that I do.(receive or send)
close(cfd); // close client fd
return 0;
}
close(cfd);
}
return 0;
}

This is a design or architecture question, too broad for a definitive answer with code.
So, you know you want to service each new connection in its own process. Your other two constraints pose (at least) two questions:
First, how is a new connection routed to one of N already running workers?
This is comparatively easy. The most common designs here are:
Each worker inherits the listening socket and performs its own accept()
The workers might mutex the listening socket, so that only one is ready to call accept() at any given time, or they might each simply call accept() — but in that case beware the thundering herd.
Workers receive already accept()ed connections from some other process via UNIX file descriptor passing.
See, for instance, this SO question.
Second, how do we ensure that N – K idle worker processes are available?
This is a larger question, one that you'll have to answer based on your comfort and any other constraints.
You need to know, not merely how many workers are alive, but which workers are idle ("free"). Having a parent process keep track of its children is an obvious start, but that won't distinguish idle workers from busy workers by itself. Could you use a shared, mutexed status table, either a file or in shared memory? Or perhaps each child communicates its status over a socketpair() — the same used for file descriptor passing — to the parent?
Then, how do you safely kill an idle worker if for some reason you exceed K? Signals? A command given over that same socketpair()? Can a newly-idle worker check the status table terminate itself if to go idle would exceed K? How do you recover from accidental worker termination (e.g., SEGV)? Etc. Etc.
Apache's MPM prefork module implements one possible design in this problem space. You may want to consult it for ideas.

Your code doesn't seem to satisfy condition number 2. Your process pool is not pre-running. The processes are created when you accept the connection. One interpretation would have you do a bunch of forks and then have the forked processes wait for the accept. One would get it and then it would do the processing.
The parent process needs to keep track of how many children are out there. You could do this in a thread which does a wait. This will wait for a child to die. (see man 2 wait for various flavors.) When the number of processes becomes too big, you could send a signal which the children could catch in order to terminate properly. However, I am assuming that the parent process would NOT fork more children until some of them died and would not over-subscribe the 'K' limit.

Related

Checking if address is reachable

I'm working on a distributed system with multiple workers.
Each worker is assigned a specific address - host and port.
As a worker, I'd like to know when another worker comes online and starts listening to their assigned address.
Currently I create a socket and keep trying to connect until I reach a timeout.
An external function calls connectionOk in a loop.
bool MyClass::connectionOk(struct sockaddr_storage other_worker) {
//connect and disconnect to verify peer is available
int fd = socket(other_worker.ss_family, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
int res = connect(fd, (const sockaddr*)&other_worker, sizeof(other_worker));
close(fd);
return res == 0;
}
However that doesn't seem to work.
A worker gets created, starts listening, but sometimes connectionOk returns false and timeout is reached.
Is there a better way to accomplish this?

Linux socket C/C++ - What is the best way to check if ip/port is already in use?

I have a system that can start multiple instances.
Every instance has a client and a server.
They are connected over socket/TCP
Every instance is started by starting a client.
The client starts (checks if IP is available, if not increase the IP by 1, checks again ...) -
The client starts the server with the free IP and connects to it. (for legacy reasons has to be like this)
Instance numbers 2, 3, 4, 5 work without issues.
...
Instance number 6. -> Fails on checking if the first IP in the range is available.
To check if IP is already in use, I do not close the socket on the server side so that it can accept the additional connection.
On the client-side, I check if I can connect to the server-side with the following code:
bool CheckIPInUse(char *ip)
{
bool ret = false;
int port = 12345;
int sock;
struct sockaddr_in serv_addr;
serv_addr.sin_family = AF_INET;
serv_addr.sin_port = htons(port);
// **non blocking** because I want the check to be fast.
sock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM | SOCK_NONBLOCK, 0);
inet_pton(AF_INET, ip, &serv_addr.sin_addr);
int ret_conn = connect(sock, (struct sockaddr *)&serv_addr, sizeof(serv_addr));
if (ret_conn == 0){
fprintf(stdout, "connected");
ret = true;
}
else if (ret_conn < 0 && (errno != EINPROGRESS)){
fprintf(stdout, "failed to connect");
}
else
{
int check_if_connected = 10;
while (check_if_connected--)
{
socklen_t len = sizeof(serv_addr);
int ret_getpeer = getpeername(sock, (struct sockaddr *)&serv_addr, &len);
if (ret_getpeer == 0)
{
fprintf(stdout, "connected");
ret = true;
break;
}
usleep(100000);
}
}
close(sock);
return ret;
}
This works for the first 5 instances.
6th instance fails to connect to the first IP in range and tries to start the server with IP which is already in use. (always the 6th).
Is there any better way to check programmatically if IP/Port is already busy?
Any ideas on what to check. for failure in the instance number 6?
The only way to check if an ip/port on a server is available is to bind() to it. If it worked, it was available (but not any more).
Any approach that involves a test connect()ion first, to see if it fails, or anything along the lines of poking somewhere in /proc to see which IPs and ports are in use -- nothing along these lines will ever be 100% foolproof. That's because even if you reach the conclusion that the port is available, it may no longer be by the time you get around to try to bind() to it.
Now, you can take, as a starting position, that a particular IP and/or port range is reserved for your application's use, and you only wish to arbitrate IP/port allocation between different instances of your application. In that case you can do that pretty much whatever you want, you're not limited to attempting to actually start instances of your application, and hope for the best. One simplistic approach is to use lock files in /var/tmp to represent all possible IP/port combination, and have your application try, in turn, to acquire a lock on the corresponding lock file, first, and once it's official, and the lock file is acquired, then the corresponding IP/port then can be established at your leisure, but the lock file must remain locked until the IP/port is no longer in use.
But in terms of attempting to check if a socket port is available, or not, the only way to do it is to bind() it, because that, by definition, is what it does. You could attempt to implement a multi-layered approach, like trying to connect() first, and then attempt to bind() it, and if the bind() fails, then keep looking for a free port. But that's creating extra complexity, without much of a benefit.
Did you check that the server did not meet its maximum backlog length ?
You may be getting "connection refused" if the server you are trying to connect to
has more pending connections then the defined backlog.
So if multiple clients are testing at the same time, one of them may encounter this.
The most probable cause of your problem is that your client is getting a connect from the server due to the listen queue. The best way to avoid this problem is to close the socket on which you call accept(2) once all the instances are in use, and reopen it again when any of the server instances are finished.
The listen queue makes the kernel to accept (send the SYN/ACK segment) connections on the otherwise not yet open socket waiting, and this will make the connection establishment quicker for the next server instances if many such connections are entering in the system. All those connections are handled in the accept(2) socket, so the best way to accept five such connections is to close the accept socket as soon as the last connection has been established (this will not avoid the problem if a connection happens to enter the server in the time between one accept(2) and the next, but the connection so established will be closed as soon as the accept socket is still open)
In my opinion, you should have a master server process that forks new processes to handle the different connection and closes the accept socket as soon as it reaches the full capacity. Once one of the servers attending the connections closes one of them, it should reopen the accept socket and accept a new connection.
IMHO, also the most robust way of implementing such a system is to allow the extra connections to get in, but not attend them, so the connection remains open in case a new client happens to enter, and it can close it if the server doesn't attend it in a timeout interval. Having a sixth client already connected, but waiting for the server to say hello, will leave you in a state in which you can start talking to the server as soon as the last service ends.

UDP real time sending and receiving on Linux on command from control computer

I am currently working on a project written in C++ involving UDP real time connection. I receive UDP packets from a control computer containing commands to start/stop an infinite while loop that reads data from an IMU and sends that data to the control computer.
My problem is the following: First I implemented an exit condition from the loop using recvfrom() and read(), but the control computer sends a UDP packet every second, which was delaying the whole loop and made sending the data in the desired time interval of 5ms impossible.
I tried to fix this problem by usingfcntl(fd, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK);and using only read(), which actually works fine, but I am unsure whether this is a wise idea or not, since I am not checking for errors anymore. Is there any elegant way how to solve this problem? I thought about using Pthreads or something like that, however I have never worked with threads or parallel programming so I would have to spend some time learning that.
I appreciate any advice on that problem you could give me.
Here is a code example:
//include
...
int main() {
RNet cmd; //RNet: struct that contains all the information of the UDP header and the command
RNet* pCmd = &cmd;
ssize_t b;
int fd2;
struct sockaddr_in snd; // sender is control computer
socklen_t length;
// further declaration of variables, connecting to socket, etc...
...
fcntl(fd2, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK);
while (1)
{
// read messages from control computer
if ((b = read(fd2, pCmd, 19)) > 0) {
memcpy(&cmd, pCmd, b);
}
// transmission
while (cmd.CLout.MotionCommand == 1) // MotionCommand: 1 - send messages; 0 - do nothing
{
if(time_elapsed >= 5) // elapsed time in ms
{
// update sensor values
...
//sendto ()
...
// update control time, timestamp, etc.
...
}
if (recvfrom(fd2, pCmd, (int)sizeof(pCmd), 0, (struct sockaddr*) &snd, &length) < 0) {
perror("error receiving data");
return 0;
}
// checking Control Model Command
if ((b = read(fd2, pCmd, 19)) > 0) {
memcpy(&cmd, pCmd, b);
}
}
}
}
I really like the "blocking calls on multiple threads" design. It enables you to have distinct independent tasks, and you don't have to worry about how each task can disturb another. It can have some drawbacks but it is usually a good fit for many needs.
To do that, just use pthread_create to create a new thread for each task (you may keep the main thread for one task). In your case, you should have a thread to receive commands, and another one to send your data. You also need for the receiving thread to notify the sending thread of the commands. To do that, you can use some synchronization tool, like a mutex.
Overall, you should have your receiving thread blocking on recvfrom, and the sending thread waiting for a signal from the mutex (wait for the mutex to be freed, technically). When the receiving thread receive a start command, it signals the mutex and go back to recvfrom (optionally you can set a variable to provide more information to the other thread).
As a comment, remember that UDP are 1-to-many, thus your code here will react to any packet sent to you (even from some random or malicious host). You may want to filter with the remote sockaddr after recvfrom, or use connect + recv. It depends on what you want.

How to Break C++ Accept Function?

When doing socket programming, with multi-threading,
if a thread is blocked on Accept Function,
and main thread is trying to shut down the process,
how to break the accept function in order to pthread_join safely?
I have vague memory of how to do this by connection itself to its own port in order to break the accept function.
Any solution will be thankful.
Cheers
Some choices:
a) Use non-blocking
b) Use AcceptEx() to wait on an extra signal, (Windows)
c) Close the listening socket from another thread to make Accept() return with an error/exception.
d) Open a temporary local connection from another thread to make Accept() return with the temp connection
The typical approach to this is not to use accept() unless there is something to accept! The way to do this is to poll() the corresponding socket with a suitable time-out in a loop. The loop checks if it is meant to exit because a suitably synchronized flag was set.
An alternative is to send the blocked thread a signal, e.g., using pthread_kill(). This gets out of the blocked accept() with a suitable error indication. Again, the next step is to check some flag to see if the thread is meant to exit. My preference is the first approach, though.
Depending on your system, if it is available, I would use a select function to wait for the server socket to have a read, indicating a socket is trying to connect. The amount of time to time to wait for a connection can be set/adjusted to to what every time you want to wait for a client to connect(infinity, to seconds, to 0 which will just check and return). The return status needs to be checked to see if the time limit was reached (no socket is trying to connect), or if there is something waiting to be serviced (your server socket indicating there is a client which would like to connect). You can then execute the accept knowing there is a socket to connect based on the returned status.
If available I would use a select function with a timeout in a loop to achieve this functionality.
as Glenn suggested
The select function with a timeout value will wait for a socket to connect for a set period of time. If a socket attempts to connect it can be accepted during that period. By looping this select with a timeout it is possible to check for new connections until the break condition is met.
Here is an example:
std::atomic<bool> stopThread;
void theThread ( std::atomic<bool> & quit )
{
struct timeval tv;
int activity;
...
while(!quit)
{
// reset the time value for select timeout
tv.tv_sec = 0;
tv.tv_usec = 1000000;
...
//wait for an activity on one of the sockets
activity = select( max_sd + 1 , &readfds , NULL , NULL , &tv);
if ((activity < 0) && (errno!=EINTR))
{
printf("select error");
}
if (FD_ISSET(master_socket, &readfds))
{
if ((new_socket = accept(master_socket, (struct sockaddr *)&address, (socklen_t*)&addrlen))<0)
{
perror("accept");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
...
}
}
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
...
stopThread = false;
std::thread foo(theThread, std::ref(stopThread));
...
stopThread = true;
foo.join();
return 0;
}
A more complete example of 'Select' http://www.binarytides.com
I am pretty new to C++ so I am sure my code and answer can be improved.
Sounds like what you are looking for is this: You set a special flag variable known to the listening/accepting socket, and then let the main thread open a connection to the listening/accepting socket. The listening/accepting socket/thread has to check the flag every time it accepts a connection in order to know when to shut down.
Typically if you want to do multi-threaded networking, you would spawn a thread once a connection is made (or ready to be made). If you want to lower the overhead, a thread pool isn't too hard to implement.

How to avoid DOS attack in this code?

I have a code written in C/C++ that look like this:
while(1)
{
//Accept
struct sockaddr_in client_addr;
int client_fd = this->w_accept(&client_addr);
char client_ip[64];
int client_port = ntohs(client_addr.sin_port);
inet_ntop(AF_INET, &client_addr.sin_addr, client_ip, sizeof(client_ip));
//Listen first string
char firststring[512];
memset(firststring,0,512);
if(this->recvtimeout(client_fd,firststring,sizeof(firststring),u->timeoutlogin) < 0){
close(client_fd);
}
if(strcmp(firststring,"firststr")!=0)
{
cout << "Disconnected!" << endl;
close(client_fd);
continue;
}
//Send OK first string
send(client_fd, "OK", 2, 0);
//Listen second string
char secondstring[512];
memset(secondstring,0,512);
if(this->recvtimeout(client_fd,secondstring,sizeof(secondstring),u->timeoutlogin) < 0){
close(client_fd);
}
if(strcmp(secondstring,"secondstr")!=0)
{
cout << "Disconnected!!!" << endl;
close(client_fd);
continue;
}
//Send OK second string
send(client_fd, "OK", 2, 0);
}
}
So, it's dossable.
I've write a very simple dos script in perl that takedown the server.
#Evildos.pl
use strict;
use Socket;
use IO::Handle;
sub dosfunction
{
my $host = shift || '192.168.4.21';
my $port = 1234;
my $firststr = 'firststr';
my $secondstr = 'secondstr';
my $protocol = getprotobyname('tcp');
$host = inet_aton($host) or die "$host: unknown host";
socket(SOCK, AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $protocol) or die "socket() failed: $!";
my $dest_addr = sockaddr_in($port,$host);
connect(SOCK,$dest_addr) or die "connect() failed: $!";
SOCK->autoflush(1);
print SOCK $firststr;
#sleep(1);
print SOCK $secondstr;
#sleep(1);
close SOCK;
}
my $i;
for($i=0; $i<30;$i++)
{
&dosfunction;
}
With a loop of 30 times, the server goes down.
The question is: is there a method, a system, a solution that can avoid this type of attack?
EDIT: recvtimeout
int recvtimeout(int s, char *buf, int len, int timeout)
{
fd_set fds;
int n;
struct timeval tv;
// set up the file descriptor set
FD_ZERO(&fds);
FD_SET(s, &fds);
// set up the struct timeval for the timeout
tv.tv_sec = timeout;
tv.tv_usec = 0;
// wait until timeout or data received
n = select(s+1, &fds, NULL, NULL, &tv);
if (n == 0){
return -2; // timeout!
}
if (n == -1){
return -1; // error
}
// data must be here, so do a normal recv()
return recv(s, buf, len, 0);
}
I don't think there is any 100% effective software solution to DOS attacks in general; no matter what you do, someone could always throw more packets at your network interface than it can handle.
In this particular case, though, it looks like your program can only handle one connection at a time -- that is, incoming connection #2 won't be processed until connection #1 has completed its transaction (or timed out). So that's an obvious choke point -- all an attacker has to do is connect to your server and then do nothing, and your server is effectively disabled for (however long your timeout period is).
To avoid that you would need to rewrite the server code to handle multiple TCP connections at once. You could either do that by switching to non-blocking I/O (by passing O_NONBLOCK flag to fcntl()), and using select() or poll() or etc to wait for I/O on multiple sockets at once, or by spawning multiple threads or sub-processes to handle incoming connections in parallel, or by using async I/O. (I personally prefer the first solution, but all can work to varying degrees). In the first approach it is also practical to do things like forcibly closing any existing sockets from a given IP address before accepting a new socket from that IP address, which means that any given attacking computer could only tie up a maximum of one socket on your server at a time, which would make it harder for that person to DOS your machine unless he had access to a number of client machines.
You might read this article for more discussion about handling many TCP connections at the same time.
The main issue with DOS and DDOS attacks is that they play on your weakness: namely the fact that there is a limited memory / number of ports / processing resources that you can use to provide the service. Even if you have infinite scalability (or close) using something like the Amazon farms, you'll probably want to limit it to avoid the bill going through the roof.
At the server level, your main worry should be to avoid a crash, by imposing self-preservation limits. You can for example set a maximum number of connections that you know you can handle and simply refuse any other.
Full strategies will include specialized materials, like firewalls, but there is always a way to play them and you will have to live with that.
For example of nasty attacks, read about Slow Loris on wikipedia.
Slowloris tries to keep many connections to the target web server open and hold them open as long as possible. It accomplishes this by opening connections to the target web server and sending a partial request. Periodically, it will send subsequent HTTP headers, adding to—but never completing—the request. Affected servers will keep these connections open, filling their maximum concurrent connection pool, eventually denying additional connection attempts from clients.
There are many variants of DOS attacks, so a specific answer is quite difficult.
Your code leaks a filehandle when it succeeds, this will eventually make you run out of fds to allocate, making accept() fail.
close() the socket when you're done with it.
Also, to directly answer your question, there is no solution for DOS caused by faulty code other than correcting it.
This isn't a cure-all for DOS attacks, but using non-blocking sockets will definitely help for scalability. And if you can scale-up, you can mitigate many DOS attacks. This design changes includes setting both the listen socket used in accept calls and the client connection sockets to non-blocking.
Then instead of blocking on a recv(), send(), or an accept() call, you block on either a poll, epoll, or select call - then handle that event for that connection as much as you are able to. Use a reasonable timeout (e.g. 30 seconds) such that you can wake up from polling call to sweep and close any connections that don't seem to be progressing through your protocol chain.
This basically requires every socket to have it's own "connection" struct that keeps track of the state of that connection with respect to the protocol you implement. It likely also means keeping a (hash) table of all sockets so they can be mapped to their connection structure instance. It also means "sends" are non-blocking as well. Send and recv can return partial data amounts anyway.
You can look at an example of a non-blocking socket server on my project code here. (Look around line 360 for the start of the main loop in Run method).
An example of setting a socket into non-blocking state:
int SetNonBlocking(int sock)
{
int result = -1;
int flags = 0;
flags = ::fcntl(sock, F_GETFL, 0);
if (flags != -1)
{
flags |= O_NONBLOCK;
result = fcntl(sock , F_SETFL , flags);
}
return result;
}
I would use boost::asio::async_connector from boost::asio functionality to create multiple connection handlers (works both on single and multi-threaded environment). In the single threaded case, you just need to run from time to time boost::asio::io_service::run in order to make sure communications have time to be processed
The reason why you want to use asio is because its very good at handling asynchronous communication logic, so it won't block (as in your case) if a connection gets blocked. You can even arrange how much processing you want to devote to opening new connections, while keep serving existing ones