In linux , is it possible to get notification when network connection is down ?
Is the any OS service for which I have to register for such notifications ?
OR is there any DBus Service of it ?
If you're using NetworkManager, it's possible to get status from it (which is, if I remember correctly, done over dbus).
But beware that a lot of Linux machines don't use NetworkManager, so you'll have to handle that. And some machines have more than one network connection, etc.
Further "network connection is down" may not be the most useful thing for you. E.g., it's possible to have a network connection, but the router has lost its Internet connection, so you've only got connectivity to local machines. Or sometimes you'll see partial Internet reachability. Depending on what you need this for, you may need to take other approaches.
Lastly, sometimes network connections die and come back quickly, especially with wireless. These transient changes are probably best ignored (unless the IP address changes).
See this forum thread (linuxquestions.org). Basically you'd need to modify the kernel for pushed notifications. Networkmanager indeed has a DBUS API, but polling periodically is a more general solution.
Related
I am working on a new Amazon Redshift database that I recently started.
I am experiencing an issue where after I connect to the database, I can run queries without any issue. However, if I spend some time without running anything (like, 5 minutes), when I try running another query or command, ir never finishes.
I am using dBeaver Community 21.2.2 to interact with the connection, and it stays "Executing query" forever. The only way i can get it to work is by cancelling, disconnecting from the redshift, connecting again and then it executes correctly. Until I stop using for some minutes, and then it's happens all over again.
I tought this was a dBeaver issue, as we have a Meabase connected to this same cluster without any issues. But today, I tried manipulating this cluster with R using RJDBC, and the same thing happens: I can run queries, until I stop, and then when I try running something else it never stops, until I disconnect and connect again.
I'm sorry if I wasn't able to explain it clearly, I tried searching for simmilar issues but couldn't.
I suspect that the queries in question are not even being launched on the database. You can check this by reviewing svl_statementtext to see if the query is even being seen. Put a unique comment in the query to help determine if it is actually the query in question.
Since I've seen similar behavior before I'll write up a possible way this can happen. In this case the queries were not being seen by the database or the connection to the database was being dropped mid execution. The cause is network switches and their configurations.
Typical network connections are fairly quick - you ask for a web page and it is given to you. Connection is complete. When you click on a link a new connection is established and also end quickly. These network actions are atomic from a network connection point of view. However, database connections are different. One connection is made and many back and forth transmissions of data happen while the connection is open. No problem and with the right set of network configurations these connections can be open and idle for days.
The problem come in when the operators of the network equipment decide that connections that have no data flowing are "stale" after some fixed amount of time. They do this so that the network equipment can "forget" about these connections and focus on "active" connections. ISPs drop idle connections a lot so that they can handle the load of traffic and connections that flow through their equipment. This doesn't cause any issues for web pages and APIs but database connections get clobbered.
When this happens is look exactly like what you describe. Both sides (client and database) think that the connection is still active but the network equipment has dropped the connection. Nothing gets through but no notification is sent either party. You will likely see corresponding open sessions on the Redshift side for these dropped connections and the database is just waiting for the client to give a command on each of them. An administrator will need to go through and close (terminate) these sessions for them to go away.
Now the thing that doesn't align with experience is the speed at which these connections are being marked as "stale". In my case my ISP was closing connections that were idle for more than 30 min. You seem to be timing out much faster than this. In some cases corporate firewalls will be configured with short idle connection timeouts for routes out of the private network to the internet. So there are cases where the timeouts can be short. The networks at AWS do not have these timeouts so if your connections are completely within AWS then this isn't your answer.
To address this there are a few ways to go. The easy way is to set up a tunnel into AWS with "keep alive" packets sent every 30 sec or so. You will need an ec2 instance at AWS so it isn't cost free. Ssh tunneling is the usual tool for this and there are write-ups online for setting it up.
The hard way (but likely most correct way) is to work with network experts to understand when the timeout is happening and why. If the timeout cannot be changed then it may be possible to configure a different network topology for your use case. Network peering or VPN could address.
In some cases you may be able to not have jdbc or odbc connections at all. You see these protocols are valid but they are old and most networking doesn't work this way anymore which is why they suffer from these issues. Redshift Data API let's you issue SQL to redshift in a single package and check on completion later on. These API calls are each independent connections so there is no possibility of "timing out" between them. The downside is this process is not interactive and therefore not supported by workbenches.
So does this match what you have going on?
I am looking for a way to receive a notification whenever the configured DNS server address of a network interface changes, using native Windows APIs (C/C++). For both performance and reaction time reasons, I'd obviously want to avoid polling.
There is, for example, the NotifyIpInterfaceChange API in Iphlpapi.dll. In my tests, it reliably triggers a notification when the host's IP address, subnet mask, or default gateway changes, but not at all when only the DNS addresses change.
My only "solution" up to this point is using WMI event queries, but it actually polls in the background, so to avoid hogging down the system, the polling interval (WQL WITHIN clause) needs to be set to several seconds, which results in a long and annoying delay for my application. Also, for various reasons (which are not the topic of this discussion), I prefer to avoid WMI usage anyway, resorting to it only when there is no other way.
Actual credit for this answer should go to RbMm, but he's not posting the answer and seems to have gone MIA.
To receive DNS change notifications, the only non-polling solution seems to be using the RegNotifyChangeKeyValue WinApi to monitor for changes under the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip[6]\Parameters\Interfaces key. Note that there's separate Tcpip and Tcpip6 keys for IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Anyway, I've implemented and thoroughly tested the solution since the original suggestion and it works without problems.
A semi-related warning: RegNotifyChangeKeyValue has its non-intuitive peculiarities, and it is unlike most other notification APIs, so be sure to study its docs.
I am a newbie to AWS and cloud computing in general, so I apologize if this question is foolish.
I am currently working on developing an app for Amazon Echo that would allow it to remotely control a PC (i.e. change volume, pause a movie, etc.). My problem is that I do not know how to communicate between my Amazon Lambda service and my Windows Application.
Any ideas?
There are potentially some problems with the way you have posed the question -- how to communicate between a Lambda Function and a Windows machine could involve a number of different solutions, but what you are looking for (as far as I can tell) is a more specific -- yet simultaneously more generalizable -- solution.
Are you trying to actually make an Alexa skill that users could use, or just something for yourself? It makes a big difference, because for just yourself there are a number of hacky solutions you could implement, like port forwarding and dynamic DNS, which fail dramatically if you try to do them in the real world. You need another component -- some kind of real-time push messaging -- that bridges between an "agent" in your Windows app and requests emitted by your Lambda code.
Your actual problem to solve is not so much how to communicate between AWS Lambda and a Windows Application, but rather one of a need for understanding how a platform like Alexa needs to communicate with a "smart home" device, specifically an entertainment device.
It is a relatively complicated undertaking, because -- fundamentally -- there is no way of communicating directly between Lambda and an arbitrary device out on the Internet. Dynamic IP addresses, network address translation (NAT), firewalls, security considerations, and other factors make it impossible to reliably initiate a connection from a Lambda function (or indeed from any Internet connected device) to any other arbitrary destination device. Most devices (my phone, my Alexa-controlled light switch, my Windows laptop) are running behind a boundary that assumes requests are initiated behind the boundary. When I open web sites, stream video, etc., I initiate the request and the response returns on the channel (often a TCP connection) that I have created, from behind my boundary (e.g. the router in my cable modem) that doesn't allow external initiation of TCP connections. They are bidirectional once established, but must be initiated from inside.
Of course, you can statically "poke a hole" in your router configuration by forwarding a specific TCP port to a specific internal (usually private) IP address, which works as long as your Internet provider doesn't change your IP address, and your internal device doesn't get a new IP address... and there'a UPnP NAT Traversal, which seems like a good solution until you realize that it is also terrible (though for a "hobbyist" application, it could work).
While this is a long and complex topic, the short answer is that Alexa, via Lambda code, is only capable of initiating connections, and your device, wherever it may be, is only capable of initiating connections -- not receiving them... and thus you need some kind of "meet in the middle" solution: something that allows the device to maintain its "connection" to a central "service" that can coordinate the interactions on demand.
For example:
AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. With AWS IoT Core, your applications can keep track of and communicate with all your devices, all the time, even when they aren’t connected.
https://aws.amazon.com/iot-core/
The client initiates the connection (e.g. via a web socket) to the IoT platform, and maintains it, so that when a message arrives at IoT, the service knows how to deliver that message to the client when it's received. ("even when they aren't online" refers to the "device shadow" capability, which allows you to programmatically interact with a proxy for the device, e.g. knowing the last temperature setting of a thermostat, and asking the thermostat to change its set point when the connection is re-established at some future point).
Or, potentially something like this:
Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably deliver messages at no cost.
Using FCM, you can notify a client app that new email or other data is available to sync.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/
Both of these potential solutions solve the problem by "knowing how to contact" arbitrary devices, wherever they may be... and I would suggest that this is the core of your actual need.
There are a lot of alternatives for such a "service," including roll-your-own websocket or HTML EventSource implementations with servers... the purpose of this is not product recommendations but rather to give you an idea of what you would need for such a scenario -- an intermediate platform that can be interacted with by the Lambda code, which also knows how to communicate with "agent" code running on the device... because both Lambda and the agent need to initiate the communication channels and thus additional components are required to bridge them together.
I need to write a win32 c/c++ application which will be able to determine whether the PC it's running on is connected to one of 2 networks. The first network is the company LAN (which has no internet connection) and the second network is a standalone switch with a single PC connected to it (the PC that the program is running on).
I'm pretty new to network programming but so far I have tried testing to see if a network drive which is held on our LAN can be mapped. This works fine if the PC is connected to the LAN, the drive mapping succeeds so so LAN detection is successful. However, if the PC is connected to the switch, this results in a VERY long timeout which is not a suitable as it will delay the program so much as to make it unusable.
Does anyone have any alternative suggestions?
I'm using c/c++ in VS 6.0
[Update]
Whilst trying a few different ideas and looking at some of the suggestions below I thought I should update with some additional information as many (if not all) of the suggestions I don't think will work.
(1) The aforementioned LAN has no external connections at all, it is completely isolated so no resolving of external DNS or pinging websites is possible.
(2) Hostname, MAC address, IP, Default Gateway, Subnet etc etc (basically everything you see in ipconfig -all) are all manually configured (not dynamic from the router) so checking any of these settings will return the same whether connected to the LAN or the switch.
(3) Due to point (2), any attempts to communicate with the switch seem to be unsuccessful, in fact almost all networking commands (ping, arp etc) seem to fail - I think due to the machine trying to connect to the LAN when it isn't there :-(
One thing I have found which works is pinging the default gateway IP which times out when connected to the switch. This is sort of ok as I can reduce the timeout of ping so it doesn't just hang for ages but it feels like a bit of a hack and I would certainly appreciate any better solutions.
Thanks
As far as TCP/IP is concerned there is no such thing as a LAN on WAN. There are a set of non-internet routable addresses like 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x but these are sometimes used by ISP short of IP addresses.
You best bet is to use Asynchronous APIs when making TCP/IP connections. WIN32 defines a whole buch of OVERLAPPED APIs for this purpose. This will prevent your application from grinding to a halt while waiting for a remote connection.
Alternatively put the socket stuff into another thread and then only notify the UI when the operation is done.
I would first try to differentiate between the two using information available locally--that is, from your computer. Does the output of ipconfig /all differ depending on which network you're connected to? If so, exploit that difference if you can.
Is it possible to get the MAC address of the standalone switch? Of the switch that controls the company LAN? That would be a sure way to tell. Unless somebody cloned the MAC address.
If you try using the existence or non-existence of some network service to determine which network you're connected to, you can never be sure. For example, if you failed to map that network drive, all you know is that the network drive isn't available. You can't say for certain that you're not connected to the company LAN. Same is true if you use ping. Lack of response from a particular machine means only that the machine didn't respond.
Various things you can look at for differentiation:
DNS domain name (GetComputerNameEx)
MAC address of gateway (ping it, then GetIpNetTable)
Routing table(do you have a gateway and default route on the company LAN)
WNet discovered network resources (WNetOpenEnum, WNetEnumResource)
Ability to resolve external hostnames (try a 5-10 names like www.google.com, www.microsoft.com and so on, if one resolves you should have internet)
You'll have to decide how many indicators are "enough" to decide you're on one or the other LAN though if tests fail. Then keep retrying until you have a definite result.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366071%28v=VS.85%29.aspx has a lot of network related functions that you can experiment with to create further indicators.
Is there an existing Linux/POSIX C/C++ library or example code for how to rebind a socket from one physical interface to another?
For example, I have ping transmitting on a socket that is associated with a physical connection A and I want to rebind that socket to physical connection B and have the ping packets continue being sent and received on connection B (after a short delay during switch-over).
I only need this for session-less protocols.
Thank you
Update:
I am trying to provide failover solution for use with PPP and Ethernet devices.
I have a basic script which can accomplish 90% of the functionality through use of iptables, NAT and routing table.
The problem is when the failover occurs, the pings continue being sent on the secondary connection, however, their source IP is from the old connection.
I've spoken with a couple of people who work on commercial routers and their suggestion is to rebind the socket to the secondary interface.
Update 2:
I apologise for not specifying this earlier. This solution will run on a router. I cannot change the ping program because it will run on the clients computer. I used ping as just an example, any connection that is not session-based should be capable of being switched over. I tested this feature on several commercial routers and it does work. Unfortunately, their software is proprietary, however, from various conversations and testing, I found that they are re-binding the sockets on failover.
As of your updated post, the problem is that changing the routing info is not going to change the source address of your ping, it will just force it out the second interface. This answer contains some relevant info.
You'll need to change the ping program. You can use a socket-per-interface approach and somehow inform the program when to fail over. Or you will have to close the socket and then bind to the second interface.
You can get the interface info required a couple of ways including calling ioctl() with the SIOCGIFCONF option and looping through the returned structures to get the interface address info.
I do't think that's quite a well-defined operation. the physical interfaces have different MAC addresses, so unless you have a routing layer mapping them (NAT or the like) then they're going to have different IP addresses.
Ports are identified by a triple of <IP addr, Port number, protocol> so if your IP address changes the port is going to change.
What are you really trying to do here?
I'm not at all sure what you're trying to accomplish, but I have a guess... Are you trying to do some kind of failover? If so, then there are indeed ways to accomplish that, but why not do it in the OS instead of the application?
On one end you can use CARP, and on the other you can use interface trunking/bonding (terminology varies) in failover mode.