I tried to use python's zmq lib. And now I have two questions:
Is there a way to check socket connection state?
I'd like to know if connection is established after call connect
I want to one-to-one communication model.
I tried to use PAIR zmq socket type.
In that case if one client is already connected, server will not receive any messages from secondary connected client.
But I'd like to get info in the second client that there is another client and server is busy.
You'd get an error if connect fails.
But I guess the real question is how often do you want to check this? once at startup, before each message, or periodically, using some heartbeat?
That does not make sense, as you can not send info without connecting first.
However, some socket types might give some more info.
But the best way would be to use multiple sockets: one for such status information, and another one for sending data.
ZMQ is made to use multiple sockets.
Related
I want to connect a Tun to a socket so that whatever data is stored in the Tun file will then end up being pushed out to a socket which will receive the data. I am struggling with the higher level conceptual understanding of how I am supposed to connect the socket and the Tun. Does the Tun get a dedicated socket that then communicates with another socket (the receive socket)? Or does the Tun directly communicate with the receive socket? Or am I way off all together? Thanks!
If I am understanding your problem, you should be able to write an application that connects to the tun device and also maintains another network socket. You will need some sort of multiplexing such as epoll or select. But, basically, whenever you see data on the tun interface, you can receive the data into a buffer and then provide this buffer (with the correct number of received octets) to the send call of the other socket. Typically you use such a setup when you insert some custom header or something to e.g., implement a custom VPN solution.
I'm writing a Socket Server in Python, and also a Socket Client to connect to the Server.
The Client interacts with the Server in a way that the Client sends information when an action is invoked, and the Server processes the information.
The problem I'm having, is that I am able to connect to my Server with Telnet, and probably other things that I haven't tried yet. I want to disable connection from these other Clients, and only allow connections from Python Clients. (Preferably my custom-made client, as it sends information to communicate)
Is there a way I could set up authentication on connection to differentiate Python Clients from others?
Currently there is no code, as this is a problem I want to be able to solve before getting my hands dirty.
When a new connection is made to your server, your protocol will have to specify some way for the client to authenticate. Ultimately there is nothing that the network infrastructure can do to determine what sort of process initiated the connection, so you will have to specify some exchange that allows the server to be sure that it really is talking to a valid client process.
#holdenweb has already given a good answer with basic info.
If a (terminal) software sends the bytes that your application expects as a valid identification, your app will never know whether it talks to an original client or anything else.
A possible way to test for valid clients could be, that your server sends an encrypted and authenticated question (should be different at each test!), e.g. something like "what is 18:37:12 (current date and time) plus 2 (random) hours?"
Encryption/Authentication would be another issue then.
If you keep this algorithm secret, only your clients can answer it and validate themselves successfully. It can be hacked/reverse engineered, but it is safe against basic attackers.
I've come to the realization where I need to change my design for a file synchronization program I am writing.
Currently, my program goes as follows:
1) client connects to server (and is verified)
2) if the client is verified, create a thread and begin a loop using the socket the client connected with
3) if a file on the client or server changes, send the change through that socket (using select for asynchronous communication)
My code sucks because I am torn between using one socket for file transfer or using a socket for each file transfer. Either case (in my opinion) will work, but for the first case I would have to create some sort of protocol to determine what bytes go where (some sort of header), and for the second case, I would have to create new sockets on a new thread (that do not need to be verified again), so that files can be sent on each thread without worrying about asynchronous transfer.
I would prefer to do the second option, so I'm investigating using SocketServer. Would this kind of problem be solved with SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer and SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn? I'm having trouble thinking about it because I would assume SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn works for newly connected clients, unless I somehow have an "outer" socket server which servers "inner" socket servers?
SocketServer will work for you. You create one SocketServer per port you want to listen on. Your choice is whether you have one listener that handles the client/server connection plus per file connections (you'd need some sort of header to tell the difference) or two listeners that separate client/server connection and per file connections (you'd still need a header so that you knew which file was coming in).
Alternately, you could choose something like zeromq that provides a message transport for you.
I want to create a simple video streaming (actually, image streaming) server that can manage different protocols (TCP Push/Pull, UDP Push/Pull/Multicast).
I managed to get TCP Push/Pull working with the SocketServer.TCPServer class and ThreadinMixIn for processing each connected client in a different thread.
But now that I'm working on the UDP protocol, I just realized that ThreadinMixIn creates a thread per call of handle() per client query (as there's nothing such as a "connection" in UDP).
The problem is I need to process a sequence of queries by the same client, for all the clients. How could I manage that ?
The only way I see I could handle that is to have a list of (client adresses, processing thread) and send each query to the matching thread (or create a new one if the client haven't sent any thread yet). Is there an easier way to do that ?
Thanks !
P.S : I can't use any external or too "high-level" library for this as it's a school subject meant to understand how sockets work.
Take a look at Twisted. This will remove the need to do any thread dispatch from your application. You still have to match up packets to a particular session in order to handle them, but this isn't difficult (use a port per client and dispatch based on the port, or require packets in a session to always come from the same address and use the peer address, or use one of the existing protocols that solves this problem such as SIP).
I'm currently writing a project in Python which has a client and a server part. I have troubles with the network communication, so I need to explain some things...
The client mainly does operations the server tells him to and sends the results of the operations back to the server. I need a way to communicate bidirectional on a TCP socket.
Current Situation
I currently use a LineReceiver of the Twisted framework on the server side, and a plain Python socket (and ssl) on client side (because I was unable to correctly implement a Twisted PushProducer). There is a Queue on the client side which gets filled with data which should be sent to the server; a subprocess continuously pulls data from the queue and sends it to the server (see code below).
This scenario works well, if only the client pushes its results to the manager. There is no possibility the server can send data to the client. More accurate, there is no way for the client to receive data the server has sent.
The Problem
I need a way to send commands from the server to the client.
I thought about listening for incoming data in the client loop I use to send data from the queue:
def run(self):
while True:
data = self.queue.get()
logger.debug("Sending: %s", repr(data))
data = cPickle.dumps(data)
self.socket.write(data + "\r\n")
# Here would be a good place to listen on the socket
But there are several problems with this solution:
the SSLSocket.read() method is a blocking one
if there is no data in the queue, the client will never receive any data
Yes, I could use Queue.get_nowait() instead of Queue.get(), but all in all it's not a good solution, I think.
The Question
Is there a good way to achieve this requirements with Twisted? I really do not have that much skills on Twisted to find my way round in there. I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem? I don't even have real event on the communication side. If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it; there should not be a need to wait for any event on the communication side, as possible.
"I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event."
You can send data using protocol.transport.write from anywhere, not just in lineReceived.
"I need a way to send commands from the server to the client."
Don't do this. It inverts the usual meaning of "client" and "server". Clients take the active role and send stuff or request stuff from the server.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem?
It shouldn't. You're inverting the role of client and server.
If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it;
False, actually.
The server is constrained to wait for clients to request data. That's generally the accepted meaning of "client" and "server".
"One to send commands to the client and one to transmit the results to the server. Does this solution sound more like a standard client-server communication for you?"
No.
If a client sent messages to a server and received responses from the server, it would meet more usual definitions.
Sometimes, this sort of thing is described as having "Agents" which are -- each -- a kind of server and a "Controller" which is a single client of all these servers.
The controller dispatches work to the agents. The agents are servers -- they listen on a port, accept work from the controller, and do work. Each Agent must do two concurrent things (usually via the select API):
Monitor a well-known socket on which it will receive work from the one-and-only client.
Do the work (in the background).
This is what Client-Server usually means.
If each Agent is a Server, you'll find lots of libraries will support this. This is the way everyone does it.