I am working on CAN where already the code is ready for send and receive, but now for our unit testing we use canalyzer to test the send/receive of the data.
Is there a way wherein I can test the send/receive using 2 hosts or on a same PC.
There are many USB-CAN interfaces with libraries for Linux/OSX/Windows, such as Komodo, Peak CAN etc. You can use them to perform the tests, and usually you can connect more than one to your PC and this way test it all on a single computer.
If you are using Linux, you can use virtual CAN, which allows local send/recv with socket interface. (see this answer about how to set it up).
Related
I am presently working on a client-server solution to transfer files to another machine via a socket network connection. Since I intend to do some evaluation on the receiving end as well I am assuming that I will need to have some kind of client or server programme running there, too.
I am fairly new to the whole client-server thing and therefore have the following elementary question:
My present understanding is that client and server will be two independent programmes running on two different machines. How would one typically ensure that the communication partner (i.e., the server when sending from a client and the client when sending from a server) is actually up and running on the remote machine that I want to transfer a file to?
So far, I have been looking into the following options:
In the sending programme include an ssh access to the remote
machine and start an instance of the receiving programme on the
remote machine.
Have the receiving programme run as a demon process on the remote
machine. This would mean that the receiving programme should always
be running on the remote machine. However, how would I know whether
the process has crashed or has been shut down for some reason and
how would one recover from that without option 1) above?
So, my main question is: Are there any additional options that might be worth considering?
Thanks for your view on this!
Depending on how your client server messages are setup, a ping (I don't mean the ICMP ping, but the basic idea) message, where the server can respond with "I am alive" would help. This way at least you know the server end is running.
It is not uncommon in production environments using these that monitoring systems are put in place. Other options worth considering - xinet.d scripts - stuff that gets started on incoming connections.
There probably new ways to achieve the automatic start/restart or start on connection of this with systemd/systemctl but I am not familiar enough with them to give you the specifics.
A somewhat crude, but effective means may be a cron job that periodically runs a script to enforce keeping the service up.
I have an embedded device that can be controlled by JSON over UDP. I am currently performing this via an iOS App, and everything works great.
I am now wanting to be able to also control my device from a remote location. And am wanting to use Azure to perform this task. I envision that I will set up an Azure Website which will enable me to select options which then send the JSON to my device, which is behind a firewall.
My question is which of the Azure Services should I be looking into? Also, what is the best way to get the JSON packet to the device behind the firewall (I do not want to use port forwarding).
In general, to avoid an attack surface from outside your LAN (where you have your embedded device), the better solution is to open and output connection from embedded device to the cloud and to leave it open so that it can send and receive data/command.
In this case, on Azure you can use the Service Bus (queue, topic/subscription or event hub) to send/receive with AMQP protocol but it is strictly related to your device and capabilities.
Can you share more information on it ? How much it is a constrained device or a more power device with an high level OS (Linux, Windows, ...) ?
Paolo Patierno
About using Amqp on devices running android is very tedious. The java implementation in dalvik is missing a lot of required apis to be there.
By the way, do you know where we can find information about related path segments to use in amqp pure syntax in Azure, to interact with IoT-Hub end-points. Like for queue for example, we can have :
amqps://:#.servicebus.windows.net/
Thanks
I am looking to write a program that will connect to many computers from a single computer. Sort of like "Command Center" where you can monitor all the remote system remotely on a single PC.
My plan is to have multiple Client Sockets on a form. They will connect to individual PCs remotely. So, they can request information from them to display on the Window. Remote PCs will be hosts. Is this possible?
Direct answer to your question: Yes, you can do that.
Long answer: Yes, you can do that but are you sure your design is correct? Are you sure you want to create parallel connections, one to each client? Probably you don't! If yes, then you probably want to run them in separate threads.
If you want to send some commands from time to time (and you are not doing some kind of constant video monitoring) why don't you just use one connection and 'switch' between clients?
I can't tell you more about the design because from your question is not clear about what you want to build (what exactly you are 'monitoring').
VERY IMPORTANT!
Two important notices to take into account before designing your app (both relevants only if the remote computers are not in the LAN (you connect to them via Internet)):
If the remote computers are running as servers, you will have lots of problems to explain your customers (if they are connected (and they probably are) to Internet via a router) how to setup the router and the software firewall. For example, if a remote computer is listening for commands from you, on port 1234 (for example) the firewall in the router will block BY DEFAULT any connection attempt from a 'foreign' computer (from you) to that port.
If your remote computers are running as clients, how they will know master's IP (your IP). Do you have a static IP?
What you actually need is one ServerSocket on the module running on your machine.
To which all your remote PC's will connect through their individual ClientSocket.
You can make your design other way round by putting ClientSocket on the module running on your machine and ServerSocket on the module running on remote machine.
But you will end up creating one ClientSocket to each ServerSocket, what if you have the number of remote servers increase.
Now if you still want to have multiple ClientSockets on your machine then as Altar said you could need a multi threaded application where each thread is responsible for one ClientSocket.
I would recommend Internet Direct (Indy) as they work well in threads, and you can specify a connect time-out per connection, so that your monitoring app will be able to get a 'negative' test result faster than with the default OS connect time-out.
Instead of placing them on the form, I would wrap each client in a class which runs an internal monitoring thread. More work initially but easier to keep independent from each other.
I'm building a system with some remote desktop capabilities. The client is considered every computer which is sharing its desktop, the server is considered a central server with a database which receives the images of all the multiple desktops. On the client side, I would like to build two projects: A windows service application and a VCL forms application. Each client app would presumably be running under a different user account on the computer, so there might be multiple client apps running at once, and they all send their image into this client service, which relays them to the central server.
The service will be responsible for connecting to the server, sending the image, and receiving mouse/keyboard events. The application, which is running in the background, will connect to this service some how and transmit the screenshots into the service. The goal is that one service is running while multiple "clients" are able to connect to it and send their desktop image. This service will be connected to the "central server" which receives all these different screenshots from different "clients". The images will then be either saved and logged or re-directed to any "dashboard" which might be viewing that "client".
The question is through what method should I use to connect the client applications to the client service to send images? They will be running on the same computer. I will need both the abilities to send simple command packets as well as stream a chunk of an image. I was about to use the Indy components (TIdTCPServer etc.) but I'm sure there must be an easier and cleaner way to do it. I'm using the Indy components elsewhere in the projects too.
Here's a diagram of the overall system I'm aiming for - I'm just worried about the parts on the far right and far left - where the apps connect to the service within the same computer. As you can see, since there are many layers, I need to make sure whatever method(s) I use are powerful enough to accommodate for streaming massive amounts of image data.
Communicates among processes, you can use Pipe/Mailslots/Socket, I also think while sending a stream file Shared Memory maybe the most efficient way
I've done this a few times now, in a number of different configurations. The key to making it easy for me was using the RemObjects SDK which took care of the communications part. With a thread that controls its state, I can have a connection to a server or service that is reliable, and can transfer anything from a status byte through to transferring many megabytes of data (it is recommended that you use small chunks for large data so that you have more fine grained control over errors and flow). I now have a set of high reliability templates that I can deploy to make a new variation quite easily, and it can be updated with new function calls without much hassle (first thing I do is negotiate versions between the client and server so they know what they can support). Because it all works at a high level, my code is just making "function calls" and never worrying about what the format on the wire is. Likewise I can switch from their binary format to standard SOAP or other without changing the core logic. Finally, the connections can be local, to the same machine (I use this for end user apps talking to a background service) or to a machine on the LAN or internet. All in the same code.
How can I detect if a machine is connected/available in the present network.
It has several uses of course, but my main concern here is that my application uses resources located in specific machines and if they are not available it will not even attempt the connection and will use local resources.
you can try making a ping to the machine. check this article Making a PING with Delphi and the WMI.
ICMP echo request (PING) will tell you if the machine is up and reachable on the network. It will not tell you if the service you want to connect to is available on the machine (up and running).
Best bet would probably be to just attempt the connection and fall back to local resources if the connection fails.
Just try to use the resource and if you get an error use the local resource instead. The strategy you are trying to implement suffers from several problems including timing windows between the test and the use, during which the resource may become unavailable, and also doesn't actually test the resource for availability, only some lower-order thing like a TCP port or the ICMP echo part of the stack. In general the best way to detect whether a resource is available is just to try to use it, and recover from the failures. You have to write code to handle those failures anyway, why do it all twice?
A different strategy than trying to connect: let the server tell the clients if the services are still available, by sending UDP Broadcast or some kind of heartbeat signal over middleware (pipes?), which the clients listens to - a publish/subscribe communication model.