I'd like to reuse an ephemeral port after closing it - udp

I want to open an ephemeral port, use it for a bit, close it --- but not allow any other processes to grab it --- and then open it again. This sequence of events allows me to test one network endpoint going down, and coming back up. In real life the port number would not be ephemeral.
I want to do this to test my network connectivity code. I'm running a large number of tests in parallel, and they use ephemeral ports to avoid conflicting with each other (and I'd rather not have a central directory of ports). My test is occasionally failing because it is unable to reacquire the same port, presumably because another test has grabbed it.

Just remember what it was and explicitly bind to it the second time. But you can't prevent anyone else grabbing it in between. Be quick ;-)

Related

How can I test an internet connection during a certain period of time?

I would like to test the internet connection of some place. Therefore I want to write my own script which is triggered every some random minutes to do some stuff.
I was thinking about:
Getting the latency until I ping some big site.
Downloading a big file from somewhere. (Bandwitdh)
But I think this is not reliable as probably the file that I try to get is cached in some provider' server.
Are there more checks necessary to measure the quality of the internet connection (Availability, Latency and Bandwith)?
How can I avoid having my requests cached?

Akka.net / Cluster - How to "Heal" the topology when the leader dies?

I set up a basic test topology with Petabridge Lighthouse and two simple test actors that communicate with each other. This works well so far, but there is one problem: Lighthouse (or the underlying Akka.Cluster) makes one of my actors the leader, and when not shutting the node down gracefully (e.g. when something crashes badly or I simply hit "Stop" in VS) the Lighthouse is not usable any more. Tons of exceptions scroll by and it must be restarted.
Is it possible to configure Akka.Cluster .net in a way that the rest of the topology elects a new leader and carries on?
There are 2 things to point here. One is that if you have a serious risk of your lighthouse node going down, you probably should have more that one -
akka.cluster.seed-nodes setting can take multiple addresses, the only requirement here is that all nodes, including lighthouses, must have them specified in the same order. This way if one lighthouse is going down, another one still can take its role.
Other thing is that when a node becomes unreachable (either because the process crashed on network connection is unavailable), by default akka.net cluster won't down that node. You need to tell it, how it should behave, when such thing happens:
At any point you can configure your own IDowningProvider interface, that will be triggered after certain period of node inactivity will be reached. Then you can manually decide what to do. To use it add fully qualified type name to followin setting: akka.cluster.downing-provider = "MyNamespace.MyDowningProvider, MyAssembly". Example downing provider implementation can be seen here.
You can specify akka.cluster.auto-down-unreachable-after = 10s (or other time value) to specify some timeout given for an unreachable node to join - if it won't join before the timeout triggers, it will be kicked out from the cluster. Only risk here is when cluster split brain happens: under certain situations a network failure between machines can split your cluster in two, if that happens with auto-down set up, two halves of the cluster may consider each other dead. In this case you could end up having two separate clusters instead of one.
Starting from the next release (Akka.Cluster 1.3.3) a new Split Brain Resolver feature will be available. It will allow you to configure more advanced strategies on how to behave in case of network partitions and machine crashes.

Akka.net Cluster Debugging

The title is a bit misleading, so let me explain further.
I have a non thread-safe dll I have no choice but to use as part of my back end
servers. I can't use it directly in my servers as the thread issues it has causes
it to crash. So, I created an akka.net cluster of N nodes each which hosts a single
actor. All of my API calls that were originally to that bad dll are now routed through
messages to these nodes through a round-robin group. As each node only has a single, single
threaded actor, I get safe access, but as I have N of them running I get parallelism, of a sort.
In production, I have things configured with auto-down = false and default timings on heartbeats
and so on. This works perfectly. I can fire up new nodes as needed, they get added to the group,
I can remove them with Cluster.Leave and that is happy as well.
My issue is with debugging. In our development environment we keep a cluster of 20 nodes each
exposing a single actor as described above that wraps this dll. We also have a set of nodes that act as
seed nodes and do nothing else.
When our application is run it joins the cluster. This allows it to direct requests through the round-robin
router to the nodes we keep up in our cluster. When doing development and testing and debugging the app, if I configure things to use auto-down = false
we end up with problems whenever a test run crashes or we stop the application with out going through
proper cluster leaving logic. Such as when we terminate the app with the stop button in the debugger.
With out auto-down, this leaves us with a missing member of the cluster that causes the leader to disallow
additions to the cluster. This means that the next time I run the app to debug, I cant join the cluster and am
stuck.
It seems that I have to have auto-down set to get debugging to work. If it is set, then when I crash my app
the node is removed from the cluster 5 seconds later. When I next fire up my
app, the cluster is back in a happy state and I can join just fine.
The problem with this is that if I am debugging the application and pause it for any amount of time, it is almost immediately
seen as unreachable and then 5 seconds later is thrown out of the cluster. Basically, I can't debug with these settings.
So, I set failure-detector.acceptable-heartbeat-pause = 600s to give me more time to pause the app
while debugging. I will get shutdown in 10 min, but I don't often sit in the debugger for that long, so its an acceptable
trade-off. The issue with this is of course that when I crash the app, or stop it in the debugger, the cluster thinks it
exists for the next 10 minutes. No one tries to talk to these nodes directly, so in theory that isn't a huge issue, but I keep
running into cases where the test I just ran got itself elected as role leader. So the role leader is now dead, but the cluster
doesn't know it yet. This seems to prevent me from joining anything new to the cluster until my 10 min are up. When I try to leave
the cluster nicely, my dead node gets stuck at the exiting state and doesn't get removed for 10 minutes. And I don't always get
notified of the removal either, forcing me to set a timeout on leaving that will cause it to give up.
There doesn't seem to be any way to say "never let me be the leader". When I have run the app with no role set for the cluster
it seems to often get itself elected as the cluster leader causing the same problem
as when the role leader is dead but unknown to be so, but at a larger level.
So, I don't really see any way around this, but maybe someone has some tricks to pull this off. I want to be able to debug
my cluster member without it being thrown out of the cluster, but I also don't want the cluster to think that leader nodes
are around when they aren't, preventing me from rejoining during my next attempt.
Any ideas?

Terminate single instance of process

Not sure if this is possible but here it goes. I have a simple server set up where multiple clients could execute a program. Each time a client executes the script to start the program, a new instance of the program starts. Now when the client stops the program execution thru another script, the instance of the program is killed. The problem is if another client is on the server at the same time running the program that instance will be killed also. Is there any way to connect a particular instance to a particular client?
Here is more detail.
The server is used to stream media from the internet. I have streaming devices attached to tvs. When a particular channel is selected, it sends a signal to the server which in turn runs several scripts, one being a script to start a video conversion process thru program called ffmpeg. The ffmpeg coverts the stream, saves it to a folder on the server making it available to the streaming device/tv. Each time a user starts a channel, an instance of the ffmpeg starts because its converting a different stream. Once the user ends viewing, the device sends a signal back to the server thru php script, which in turn runs a script called cleanup. The cleanup script is a bat file that kills the ffmpeg and deletes the files that are no longer needed. All works great except if one individual elects to stop viewing while the other continues. I don't know how to tell the difference between each instance of ffmpeg. I don't want it to kill all instances just the one connected to the one particular stream that needs to end. I do have the capability of obtaining each device ip address when the user first selects the channel. Is there anyway to link the ip to the particular instance?
Actually took advice from above and renamed each instance as ip, stored ip in temp file, was then able to match it to the ip making the cancel call.

BIND9.7. When several named processes are running, how to judge which process is providing the service?

For example, I execute "sudo named" several times, so there are several named processes running. When I use "pidof named", I get several pids.
I want to calculate the CPU usage rate of the BIND process,so I need to get some parameters from "/proc/pid/stat", so I need the pid of the named process which is really providing the domain resolution service.
What's the difference between the named process which is providing the service and the others? Could you give me a detailed explanation?
thanks very much~
(It's my first time to use stackoverflow , to use English to ask quetions , please ignore those syntax errors.)
There should be just one named running, the scripts that manage the service ensure that. You shouldn't start it like that, you should use what your distribution uses to start it, probably something along the lines of service bind start (that is probably a RedHat-ism), or /etc/rc.d/bind start (for bog-standard SysVinit).
I was responsible for DNS for quite some time here. Some tips:
DNS is a very critical service, configure and monitor with extreme care. Do read up on setting up and managing this, don't go ahead until you are absolutely clear.
Get somebody as a backup for the case that you aren't available, and make sure they understand the previous point.
DNS isn't CPU intensive (OK, with signed domains and that newfangled stuff that might have changed), it is memory intensive (and network intensive, or at least sensitive to delays). Our main DNS server was running for months at a time, and clocked up some half hour of CPU time during that kind of period IIRC.
Separate your master server (responsible for the domain(s) from the servers queried by clients (caching servers). There have been vulnerabilities where malformed questions or "answers" to questions that hadn't been asked soiled the database
The master server will have all the domain information in RAM, make sure you have got enough of it
Make sure all machines under your jurisdiction use the same caching server. It makes no sense for more than one, that destroys the idea of cache.
The caching servers collect immense amounts of data over time. This data rarely is performance critical, so configure them with plenty of swap space to accommodate overflows.
Bind issues as many named processes as many CPUs you have:
man named:
-n #cpus
Create #cpus worker threads to take advantage of multiple CPUs. If not specified, named will try to determine the number of CPUs present and create one thread per CPU. If it is unable to determine the number of CPUs, a single worker thread will be created.
External source:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/140986/multiple-named-processes-for-bind9-in-debian