Sending TCP Packets to outside computer without Port Forwarding - vb.net

I'm new to internet-based / network programming, and this is my first time using packets in any language.
I want to create a console application that lets people connect to a chat room and talk to people. For the moment, I just want to send a receive a packet.
I am using TcpListener to recieve and TcpClient to send. I want it to be simple for people using it and don't want them to have to port forward in order to use it.
Can I send TCP without port forwarding or will I have to use something else?
Thanks in advance.

Related

UDP Broadcasting via Hamachi - Is it possible in Windows?

I'm using Game Maker: Studio and already got the UDP broadcasting to work, but only for people using the internet in the same router. But, I want to broadcast via Hamachi too, so there's no need to enter the IP manually.
This is the function I can use: http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/networking/network_send_udp.html
And this one I use for local broadcast: http://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/networking/network_send_broadcast.html
Your gamemaker UDP packets are as good as any other. So if you can send ping requests to an IP, you should be able to send it any UDP packet you want.
When you ping an address through hamachi, you are actually sending UDP packets to it. So if you want to know if UDP communication will work through hamachi, try to ping someone with the console (type "ping [his IP]"). If it works, then any UDP packet with he correct address should travel correctly, including the ones emitted by your gamemaker app.
Be aware, though, that you may have to cope with a greater packet loss ratio than on your local network. Contrarily to TCP, UDP packets may sometimes not reach their destination.

How do I ping a server port with iOS 5 SDK

Basically, I want to check to see if a game server is online/offline but the server is hosted through a port, how would I go about pinging it to check this. For testing purposes the server I want to ping is fr7.mooshroom.net:25667, however eventually I will be importing the server IP and port from an online plist so could the ip address and port be separated
If you could give me a step by step guide on how to do this, that would be much appreciated.
I am using the Reachability by tonymillion because the apple one doesnt work with iOS 5.
First, it depends on if you are talking about TCP or UDP.
If it's TCP, then the answer may be simple: try to open a TCP connection to the server at that port. If the connection opens, drop the connection and report success. Otherwise, failure. This is the simplistic view. It's possible if there are load balancers or firewalls in front of the server, the TCP connection may open but the backend server is down.
UDP would be harder. There is no way to know when you send UDP data that the server got the data unless it sends you some kind of response. It's possible that if the UDP server is down and you sent a message to the port, your computer might get an ICMP Error message back. That would definitely let you know the server is down. But firewalls may block this message getting back to your device, so that might not be reliable.
Otherwise, you need to send a properly formatted message to the server to get some kind of response. This is protocol-dependent but is the most reliable.
The traditional "ping" message is an ICMP echo query and response message. As such, there is no "port" associated with ICMP.

How do all the requests connect to a web-server using the same port?

How does a web-server serve its client using the same port(80) for a TCP connection. For a UDP connection, i understand that there is no connection, per se, so we can have multiple clients send packets to same port. If i try to use an already used port on my localhost, i get BindException.
One solution i see to this is starting a thread for each connection, but wouldnt this be cumbersome for site like google/yahoo where there a >100000 connections in each server?
What solutions do web servers employ for this problem?
Server listens on a well-known port (80) and delegate the request to a worker socket once it receive the request. That way it can serve the next request. You can write your own simple server to understand whats going on. Oracle site has a nice example code. [1]
[1] http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Networking/Webserver/WebServer.java
first it creates a server socket;
ServerSocket ss = new ServerSocket(port);
then it listnes on the specified port and create a new socket once it accepts the request;
Socket s = ss.accept();
As shown in the code, it has a worker thread pool, so at a given moment you can control the number of request get served by the server at a given time. Others wait in a Queue may be.
You only have one port for listening, but a connection has two ports, one on each side of the connection. This pare must be unique.
So, say you connect to google.com port 80, then your connection will have some port on your machine, say 42312 and port 80 at google.com. You can see your connections with netstat -a. To get a shorter list: netstat -an| grep ESTABLISHED" Which shows all established connections without resolving their IPs to names.
AFAIK, Apache will start a new thread for every request, which is a big reason that event driven servers like Node.js are a little faster. Google and Yahoo also have TONS of servers and spread this large processing load among them. What Roger says also makes sense, although I'm not 100% sure on the details of how exactly google doing output on port 42312 would reach your computer at port 80 :P

Network UDP broadcast design?

I am working on a C++ server/.NET client applications couple in which my server (which runs the c++ on linux) broadcasts a message to show it's alive to the whole network and my .NET program listens for packets and parses to get the uptime of the server.
As I have read, to send a regular UDP broadcast to the broadcast address, I simply have to send a packet to 192.168.0.255 (in my case 192.168.2.255) or 255.255.255.255. Is this right? Can I use the same port address? Are there any other necessities?
I understand the fact that if my .NET program listens on that particular address it is possible to receive packets from other applications than my C++ server program. Is there any method of "signing" the packet on the C++ server-side in order for my .NET program to read the header of the packet and see that it is (almost) the one I am looking for?
Regardless of the language you are using, here is my answer:
Regarding the broadcast IP addresses, both addresses are broadcast addresses but the limited broadcast address (which is 255.255.255.255) won't be forwarded by routers. It is better to use the subnet-directed broadcast address (192.168.2.255).
In order to send/receive a broadcast address, you need to define your broadcast address (broadcast IP address and port number). For example: 192.168.2.255 and port number 3000. The client applications (the senders) MUST enable SO_BROADCAST socket option as follows:
int enabled = 1;
setsockopt(sockfd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, &enabled, sizeof(enabled));
where sockfd is the socket descriptor.
The server application will listen on a specific port number (port 3000). Normally, the server will respond to each request using unicast message.
There will be no conflict as long as no application is listening on the same port number. Your server will not run if another application is listening on the same port unless you enabled SO_REUSEADDRESS socket option. However, if there is a conflict, then your signiture is depending on your protocol (message format). So, check the message format and reject the message if it does not follow the message format defined by your application protocol.
For client applications, the received packet is unicast (unless you have another design). So, no conflict at this side.
You also have to enable the SO_BROADCAST socket option in C++ to send broadcast traffic, or you'll get a permission denied error:
int broadcastPermission = 1;
setsockopt(socketDescriptor, SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, (void*)&broadcastPermission, sizeof(broadcastPermission))
If your .NET program listens for broadcast traffic, it will receive any and all broadcast traffic on the network sent on that port, including traffic not sent by your server. You could put a "marker" in the payload of the broadcast messages sent by your server. This way, your .NET program could distinguish which ones it cares about.
Beyond that, I would recommend using multicast instead of broadcast. Broadcast traffic is usually restricted to hosts on the same subnet. In layman's terms, if you have a router in your network, a host on side A of the router will not see broadcast traffic sent by a host on side B (and vice versa) because the router "blocks" it. Routers will almost always forward multicast traffic if a host has joined the multicast group.

How to write simple SMPP server

I want to write a simple SMPP Server that basically forwards traffic to another SMPP server (C#, PHP). What are the things I need to know? How do I proceed?
With regards to Goran's comment, one possible solution would be a simple tcp proxy such as simpleproxy.
From the Ubuntu package description:
simpleproxy acts as a simple TCP proxy. It opens a listening socket on
the local machine and forwards any connection to a remote host. It can be
run as a daemon or through inetd.
Olaseni,
I've done something similar in the past, but i used perl. What i did was taking a port forwarding proxy which i downloaded from accordata.com. (port-proxy.pl)
I modified this to use the NET::SMPP module to validate PDU's when reading the incoming socket. Once the PDU was of type "Bind_request" i would validate against a dbase, replace credentials if validation was successfull and than forward or if credentials were not validated, issue a reject to the client and disconnect. Alternatively if the PDU contained anything else, i would forward using the logic that was already existing in port-proxy.pl.
You can write simple smpp lib and forward smpp traffic from many applications to the one smpp connection to the sms provider
I can advice you jsmpp lib, but it's for java. It's very simple and cool lib. Many low level things happen behind the scenes and you can focus on your business logic
Find more here
I have written exactly what you are asking for in vb.net
What i did was listen for inbound PDU (connect, bind, sms, and disconnect too) identifying each inbound connection uniquely - for the authentication bit,
then i forward the traffic onward to the delivery smsc.
Your SMPP service simply needs to listen for inbound PDU packets... as well as send heartbeat packets to the connected clients, if required.