My app communicates with an external server using AsyncSocket as a Client.
(the working code can be found here)
When the app starts, the user types in the IP address of the server computer.
assuming both iOS and server is sitting on the same subnet
Question: is there a way to "scan" the network for the server thus avoiding the user manual input for server IP ?
I can iterate the IPs one by one in a loop (10.0.1.x 10.0.1.x++)
yet it seems wrong and wasteful.
is there another more elegant way to do so?
I had an iOS project doing server discovery in the current (Wi-Fi) network. The typical solution is to use UDP broadcasting to ask for server info and then listen to a UDP response. As soon as you get the response with the server address you can establish connection using TCP sockets.
CocoaAsyncSocket is good enough for this. I used GCDAsyncUdpSocket and GCDAsyncSocket.
I understand you probably need more info on the topic. I'll try to extend the answer when I have time to.
Related
I have developed a WebRTC based application along with Kurento-Media-Server.
Problems with this application is:
It works but only on open network (i.e. if run on a network without firewall).
When in firewall it runs sometimes (once out of 10 attempts).
I have tried several things with the firewall, I have disabled all kind of incoming/outgoing traffic. I have created a port-forwarding for my application as well as Kurento-media server.
I am not sure how much useful this information might be but I am deploying my
application on the same physical box along with Kurento-Media-Server. I have configured google's STUN server on my client.js, I have also configured same STUN servers on kurento using code. I haven't configured TURN server.
Just confirming this, signaling server can be behind firewall along with rest of the application, correct?
I am not sure what to look for now, any help in this area would be great.
EDIT-1
From this link I learned that my current network on which my isn't working it has issues with plain websocket connection, it doesn't allow it, it only allows secure Websocket connections.
EDIT-2
Image of netscan:
In my phone network where my app works fine I see all greens in Websocket's "plain" column.
EDIT-3 Solved
Finally found the problem, We were using a router for testing and development and I found that the router had issues, I used LAN cable on the same router and everything worked fine. Calls from application were working just fine. Firewall related details help in configuring the firewall later on.
Based on your problem description it seems all the UDP traffic is not open in your firewall. WebRTC media run on UDP ports.As you mentioned it works one out of 10 times whch means only few UDP ports are open in your firewall.You are lucky when traffic comes via tose ports.You can open port-range in your firewall and configure the same in kurento-media-server config.Your job should be done.
Even if you configure TURN server you need to open certain ports for outgoing and incoming UDP traffic.For TURN server default port is 3478 or 8443 for sending data towards it but for incoming traffic you need to configure port-range on your TURN server and open those ports in your firewall. Always remember TURN server is assured way to connect but it's always costly.
What I want is, basically, to create a connection between two different computers on same local network. But i want to do this by computers' local IP's. (like 192.168.2.23 etc)
This must be a totally local connection. no TURN or STUN Servers. I am not sure if this is possible. Because there are not much documentation/example/information about WebRTC.
So, how can I create a connection from my computer to another one just passing its local IP as parameter?
Update: To be more clear; imagine there is an html page contains some code that activates my camera and audio services. and another -almost same- page is open in other computer. Waiting a connection request... And there is a textbox in my page to type an IP belongs to other computer on my local network. type 192.168.2.xx and bingo! i have connection between me and other computer.
I want this process as IP based, because there may be more than 2 devices on the network. And all of them are possible devices to create connection. So i need to reach them by their IP's.
Any example code or explanation would be great! even if it tells that this is not possible.
Thanks
Peer discovery is a vital part in any WebRTC application. It's an expensive term for saying: "Hi, I'm computer 4 and I want to talk to you!".
See it as calling a friend over the phone. You need to dial his number first.
This part is not defined in the WebRTC standards. You need to implement this logic in your application. Once you know who you want to call, you need a way of exchanging vital information. This is called signaling, like flo850 put in his answer.
Signaling is needed before any peer-to-peer connection can be set up.
To come up with an idea for your use case of 7 devices in a LAN.
If you have these devices connected to for example a WebSockets server and are in the same channel.
The WebSockets server can be written to route messages to specific receivers.
Devices connected to the channel often are identified with some kind of ID, imagine you use the device's IP.
When you want to talk to computer 4 with IP 192.168.0.4 you send the exchange messages (signaling) on the channel to the receiver with ID, the IP of the device you want to connect with.
How to send the signaling (offer, answer) is described here with example code.
Hope this helps
Users usually sit behind NATs; that's why ICE concept implemented in WebRTC.
If both users are sitting behind same NAT; you can skip ICE servers by passing "NULL" parameter value over "RTCPeerConnection" constructor:
var peer = new [webkit|moz]RTCPeerConnection ( null );
Now, browser will use "host" candidates, also known as "local" candidates.
you still need a signaling server. During the ICE candidate search, your clients will exchange their local ip through this signaling server
For an iOS app I am developing, I want multiple phone to connect to each other and be able to voice chat between those devices.
I have it working when both devices are on the same network. This was quite simple and most of the stuff I want to do, is possible.
But now I am adding internet support, which is quite a hassle. I'll first try to explain how I want to match the devices, using a small webservice I set up.
Server
Start a new GameKit session, with session-mode GKSessionModePeer
Find the "Peer ID" of the server on the session I just created
Create a new CFSocketRef on an free port and keep it ready to accept connections
Send Peer ID and Port number to my webservice, running on an external server.
WebService
Webservice receives the information and stores it together with an ID and the IP address of the client in a database.
Send ID back to Server, which displays the ID
Client
When the user chooses to use the "Online" feature of GameKit to search for games, I ask the user for an ID (where the user should input the ID the server receives).
Client connects to the webservice supplying the ID. The webservice returns the information about the session (IP, PORT, Peer ID) of the server.
The user tries to connect to the IP address, with the port information and set up an input and output stream with the server.
This does not work ofcourse, because my network does not allow incoming connections and a random port (from an external network).
But now the question is, how do I solve this? I want to be able to set up a peer to peer connection between 2 devices, those devices could be on the same network, but also on separate networks.
Is there a framework, example or anything showing how to do this? I want to be able to send data from device to device, without sending it to a server first.
I'm not aware of any frameworks that do this. I do however have a lot of experience with p2p networking across multiple networks.
One important rule I learned: when communicating between networks, don't create a direct connection unless necessary. There are just too many factors that can (will?) cause issues, such as firewalls, NATs, etc.
Sure, you can let the connection try first. You can try to connect to the given IP addresses*, but in most cases it will fail. Even when using UPnP and NAT-PMP, you'll find that in a lot of cases (more than half?) you won't be able to accept incoming connections at all.
So make sure to have a backup plan. Make a network layer abstraction that doesn't only listen(), but also connects to a server. That way, when you can't connect to the IPs* of the client, you simply setup a connection via the server and the network abstraction takes care of it all.
Let me reiterate the above: don't rely on incoming connections only, always have a backup plan.
* I write IPs because clients can have multiple local/remote IPs. Always iterate over all these IPs when connecting. Example: my phone has 2 local IPv4 addresses (10.0.0.172 and 10.8.0.2), and an IPv6 address ([2001:x:x::6]). Of these three addresses, only the IPv6 address is publicly reachable, and the two IPv4 addresses are on different subnets so whether you can connect to them depends on the subnet that the other client is on. Always try to connect to both, and fall back to a server-proxied connection when it fails.
** I mentioned IPv6, yes. Let's not forget that IPv6 is not limited by NATs, unlike IPv4, and this means that you're far more likely to get a good connection via IPv6 than IPv4, if supported.
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.
My task is to write a Messenger program for both internal and external staffs, I actually made it. However, I thing this is really not a good approach by using the client software keep "check-mesg" from server. So I think I am just simulating the IM program.
I want to make the client app become a listening server, and let user p2p talking without a "mesg-centre" at the main server(unless offline mesg happen). The question is how do I tell the external user ( other client app ) my location while I am behind a router ?
Are those other IM programs running on the client machine as a server too? and how do they get through ?
Thanks in advance!
It's quite complicated to connect to systems behind a router and not always possible. A well-documented way to do this with UDP is the STUN protocol (used mainly for SIP-based VoIP). If it is not possible to get behind the router, you can only use a server in the open network as intermediator (some P2P systems also promote well-connected peers to such intermediators). SIP uses TURN for as intermediator protocol. SIP's protocol to find out the right solution for a client is ICE.
See also NAT traversal.