I have an ios app that sends a command to a php script listening on a windows 2008server with wamp 2.5. If no response comes back in X seconds it sends back the command to the server. Each command contains also a session identifier.
The problem appears when the 2nd command sent to the server executes before the first. This way it alters the session identifier of the user that sent both commands, and when the 1st command tries to execute, it says the session id is incorrect.
Usually this scenario happens on peak moments when many users connect and thus the delay of the 1st command.
What is the proper way to handle these commands delays of the same user? Or queue them or manage them from apache?
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TL;DR: Rails-server restarts aren't handled gracefully in Action Cable, resulting in corrupted state. How to fix that?
I run a Rails server which uses Action Cable, among other things.
When I change a file, the server restarts as expected. But it doesn't exactly restart gracefully.
The Action Cable connection logs {"type":"disconnect","reason":"server_restart","reconnect":true} in the established socket. Then the socket appears to be cut and my channel's unsubscribed method does not run. Upon reconnect, however, the subscribed method does run—as it should, but now we have an asymmetry. Something as simple as keeping track of the number of connected clients has become unreliable because upon a server restart that number will now double although the true number remained the same. That's because it gets to increment the count when subscribed is called, but decrementing the counter happens in unsubscribed, which is not called when the server restarts.
If this only happened in development, it wouldn't be a huge issue, but it happens in production as well during server restarts caused by deployments.
How do I tell Rails to restart the server gracefully, by which I mean it should also run the unsubscribed method in my channel instead of just cutting the connection?
EDIT: I've also filed an issue with Rails: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/41005
I have google'ed a lot on this question but haven't found an answer. I have a Guacamole server that connects to a local VNC session and I would like for it to disconnect the user session if it detects no activity for an hour.
What I've tried and attempted
used xprintidle to show idle time of the user, this works so will be put in a script that might be used later to terminate an idle session.
I have looked at Guacamole's api-session-timeout and set it for a minute, I had hoped it would not reconnect to the same session once the VNC server stops abruptly. It seems this did not work.
I have tried to use guacamole's user-mappings.xml to specify the parameter "autoretry" and set that to "1". Restarted and this did not work, I'm thinking its not used this way.
I have went to the guacamole postgres database and manually inserted the entry for autoretry into the parameter table. Restarted, but this did not work.
I have went to the VNC side (I use TurboVNC) and looked at the flag -idletimeout and configuration option max-idle-timeout. This terminates the TurboVNC service when there are no active connections. It is not what I am after, I'm trying to only disconnect the session when the user is idle.
I figured that the VNC side would not work because even if the VNC session is terminated Guacamole would keep on retying forever to reconnect to that session.
From some posts on the Guacamole mailing list it seems that disabling auto reconnect is not possible without a recompile from source.
Is there a way to disconnect an active session after an idle timeout period? or maybe a way to stop Guacamole from reconnecting?
I am using the Twilio Network Traversal Service as part of a native application I am working on to perform peer-to-peer remote desktop connections. We implement a subset of the WebRTC protocol stack that is equivalent to the WebRTC data channels (not the WebRTC video and audio protocols). When using a TURN relay, the TURN allocation seems to be invalidated randomly somewhere between a few minutes and a maximum of 12 minutes from the session start. This issue looks very similar to this one, but the proposed workaround (sending silent audio) is not acceptable in my case, since I do not implement the WebRTC audio/video protocols.
I have been pulling my hair on this problem for the last two weeks, and isolated the issue as being the Twilio service itself. To compare, I have used a web based WebRTC data channel demo using firefox and the Xirsys TURN server cloud. I have wireshark captures showing firefox getting disconnected with Twilio just like my native application, while the exact same firefox demo doesn't get disconnected when using the Xirsys servers.
I was using Xirsys originally, but I experienced some instability with their service that made me switch to Twilio, which is why I would rather have Twilio fix this issue instead of going back with Xirsys. At the bare minimum, I would rather have two WebRTC hosting providers I can choose from that I know should work fine. This is why I am taking the time to explain the issue in detail so it can get fixed.
Here are two wireshark captures (with the peer-to-peer data messages filtered out) showing firefox using WebRTC data channels and the Twilio TURN relay servers:
The traffic stops being relayed after 4 minutes in the first capture, and after about 11 minutes in the second capture. In both captures, firefox detects that traffic stops being relayed (at the data channel level) and attempts a graceful disconnection by sending a Refresh request packet with a lifetime of zero. Both graceful disconnections result in a 437 Allocation Mismatch error, indicating that the server doesn't even know about the allocation firefox is trying to close gracefully.
With my native application, this would often take the form of a CreatePermission Request message that fails with a 438 "Wrong nonce" error, which is basically what should happen if a client tries to update the permission on an allocation that no longer exists. The error code 438 usually means "Stale nonce", which is not really an error, but an indication that the nonce has expired and the client should try again using the new nonce contained in the "error" message. It took me a while to figure out, but even if the error code is 438, the error string is not the same. I have observed a true stale nonce error with Xirsys and successfully updated my permission with the new nonce from the error response, so I know I can properly handle this case in my implementation.
Here is the source code for the WebRTC data channel demo I have used:
https://github.com/devolutions/webrtc-demo
For comparison, here is the same firefox data channel demo using the Xirsys TURN server cloud:
In this capture, I have let the demo run for about 16 minutes (it works for much longer than that, the longest I have tried is two hours). We can see that the traffic keeps getting relayed for the entire duration of the session, and CreatePermission requests keep getting sent by firefox with success. At the end, the graceful disconnection is triggered by firefox closing the WebRTC data channel (instead of being closed due to traffic no longer being relayed). As opposed to the Twilio captures, the Refresh request with a lifetime of zero is successful: the Xirsys TURN server still knows about the allocation and sends back a success response, as expected.
It should be noted that the ICMP unreachable errors are normal because I think in this case firefox is no longer listening on the given port when the response comes back. In other words, it sends the Refresh request with a lifetime of zero and doesn't wait for the answer to come back.
For the time being, I have no other choice but to go back with Xirsys, but I would really like if the Twilio Network Traversal Service could be fixed. Let me know if you have more questions regarding the issue.
I have uploaded the wireshark captures here for reference.
EDIT: I have modified the webrtc demo page such that it doesn't close the connection when the ice connection state is set to 'disconnected'. Now I get the real disconnection when the ice connection state goes to 'failed'. However, it effectively didn't change anything, since in this case it takes just a few seconds more for the state to go from 'disconnected' to 'failed'.
Since I have new relevant screenshots and captures, I am updating the original question to clarify certain problems pointed out by Philipp Hancke:
First, here is a new capture with the ice connection state fix (the browser closes the connection only when the state goes to 'failed'):
It's interesting to see that this time, the session stayed up for a whole 18 minutes. This was taken on a saturday morning, so I'm guessing that the issue could be related to the current workload on the twilio servers. However, it failed in the exact same way as it always does so far for me. As a bonus, we even have a valid stale nonce response that is correctly handled by firefox.
However, if we take a different view of the same capture, we can see that the traffic stops being relayed for a solid 30 seconds before firefox considers the connection as being dropped and sends the Refresh request with a lifetime of zero. As in previous captures, the server responds with an Allocation Mismatch error, indicating it doesn't know which allocation firefox is talking about.
The last eight packets being sent are of the same size, so my guess is that they are retransmissions. After 30 seconds of retransmissions, it is likely that SCTP considers the transport as being dropped.
With regards to the refresh request with a lifetime of zero, I did a test where I close the connection early on, from the browser. In this case, the server recognizes the allocation and returns a success response:
The allocation mismatch is the easiest symptom to observe, but in my testing with my native application, I have seen similar errors with Refresh requests for non-zero lifetimes, and with CreatePermission requests (438 "Wrong nonce" error). However, since the browser closes the connection after 30 seconds of data not being relayed, it is hard to observe these errors with the current webrtc demo. If we could change that timeout to 10 minutes, we would see those errors as well.
Excellent problem description!
Without the server log this is hard to determine what goes wrong. I tried with the appear.in TURN servers which run an up-to-date version of coturn and show the same behaviour as the Twilio servers. Xirsys seems to be running a custom version of coturn (Coturn-0.5 'Xirsys Turn Services' from the software field but coturn never had such a version).
In both captures, firefox detects that traffic stops being relayed (at the data channel level) and attempts a graceful disconnection by sending a Refresh request packet with a lifetime of zero.
Not quite. A refresh request with a lifetime of 0 is used to discard an allocation. At that point it does not matter what the server returns as the connection is beyond repair anyway.
This is caused by peerjs closing the peerconnection if the iceconnectionstate changes to disconnected, here in your bundled library version.
This is overly aggressive (and does not even fix things) and we've had a discussion about what the specification should do wrt to trying to fix things with an ice restart here which also links to a great explanation of the disconnected state.
The disconnected state probably happens because a few packets get lost. But this is something that can happen when there is minor congestion. I'd recommend removing the pc.close() in the disconnected case.
If you are looking for other TURN providers, Tokbox provides the same service. For datachannels the latency of a properly run distributed TURN network does not matter as much as for VoIP so you might run your own servers in a single location instead.
My main question is how to detect the application termination by the end user when it was in the background (Suspended) to be able to send logout request to the server ?
We already have a timeout interval in the server to kill the session, but assume that the interval is 5 minutes so this means that the session will be alive for 5 minutes after the user terminated the app and anyone can sniff on the data and reuse it.
Notes:
We use HTTPS connection and SSL Certificate Pining.
We also implemented a heartbeat web service to be called by client app every fixed interval to tell the server to keep the session alive for this interval, if this web service didn't call for specific session, the server will kill this session.
Once your app is suspended you don't get any further notice before you are terminated. There is no way to do what you want.
Plus, the user could suspend your app to do something else (like play a game) and then not go back to your app for DAYS.
If you want to log out when the user leaves your app, do it on the willBeSuspended message. Ask for more background time and send a logout right then and there.
Mohamed Amer,
Here is an approach used by Quickblox Server and I feel its pretty much solid though it involves a little overhead.
Once the client application (either iOS android) establishes the session with quickblox server, quickblox server expects the client application to send the presence information to server after a regular interval continuously.
Sending the presense information is pretty much simple. They have written a api which we keep hitting after a interval of 5 mins with session id that we have. They validate the session id and once found valid they will extend the expiration time for the user ascociated with that id for 5 mins more.
What they will do I believe is that,
Approach 1 : they maintain the last hit time and for all the subsequesnt request they check if the request time is within the the time frame of 5 min if yes simply process it. If the request comes after 5 min they will delete the session id for the user and respond saying you have timeout the session.
Approach 2 : Because they provide online and offline info as well they cant simply depend on the incoming request to delete the session id from server so they probably create a background thread which swipes over the db to find the entry with last hit time greater then 5 min and removes it from DB. and declares the user session expired.
Though this involves client apps continously hitting the server and increases the burden on the server for the app like chat application in which presense information is so vital this overhead is still fine i believe.
Hope I have provided you with some idea at least :)
I have to add e-mail notifications to a client server application.
Notifications happen as the user do some particular action on the client UI.
If I had a middle tier or a service running at server I can imagine how to do it:
1) I simply create a DB tables with "pending notifications"
2) as a user does an action that generates a notification I add a record to the table
3) serverside I would continuously try to send those mails and removing them from the table once sending is succesful
Now I cannot do this now, I have a plan to add a service later on, but for now I must go the quick and dirty way.
So somehow what I was thinking to is to implement something like this:
1) as a notify-worth event occurs at client, the same client (my exe) tries to send the notification, upon failure it will log the notification in the "pending notifications" table (failure can be becuase lack of internet connection or any other problem)
2) I add a Timer that will work from any client machine to check for pending notifications. If there are any the client will try to send the e-mail (using a transaction: I will mark a field as "TryngToSendFromClientX" and in case of failure I will reset that field to NULL)
I think this approach would work, it has obvious limitations (if after failure no one logs into the system, no notification will be sent - same would be if service goes "down"). But can you comment on this approach and suggest a better one?
Additional notes (to better understand the scenario):
a) Note: all notifications are sent from the same e-mail account.
b) I don't need to keep track of who sent the e-mail.
c) the problem of creating the service now is that it will basically complicate significantly deployment and I need to create tools for monitoring the status of the service. Something that I will do in future but not now, in future I have plan to add more functionality (not only sending notifications) to the service, so in that case it makes more sense to create it.
d) I will send e-mails by using Indy components and SMTP server.
If you are not willing to create the service now, I think you are stuck with the scenario you describe. There are some things though you could do to circumvent the problem of no user firing up the client anymore while there are still pending messages.
You could add a commandline utility (or commandline parameter as bepe4711 suggested) that will only check for pending messages and try to send them.
Add this commandline utility to the StartUp folder or Run key in the registry. This way messages will at least get sent when the computer restarts, even if the user does not fire up the your app.
Add a scheduled task to run this utility at least once every day. The scheduled task can be added by code or by your installer.
If you do both, you will only have to worry about pending messages of users that never start their computer again.
Perhaps you can add a parameter to your client which causes it to just look at the pending notifications and send them. After this it can terminate itself. It will just act like some kind of service.
Then you install the client on the server and start it every x minutes.
I do something very similar to the approach you describe. Instead of sending emails I need to call a web service. My application is installed on several laptops and they are commonly not connected to any network.
When my application raises an exception I collect various bits of information including user comments and screen shots. Then I attempt to send this to our web service. If by chance the web service is not available. (i.e. not connected to the internet or web service is down) I write the results to an XML file on disk in the User Profile (App_Data) directory.
The one major difference is I don't poll to check to see if the server is up. I attempt to send them again on the startup of the application.
If both Systems are running on Windows, have a look at MS Message Queue. It is designed to send notifications to systems, which are not allways online. I did it in .Net, there are already easy to use classes implemented. Not sure about Delphi.
Latest version of Windows uses much more the Windows Task Scheduler, and now task can be fired on event (i.e. when a network card gets connected...). You could write a separate utility that tries to send pending notification, even if noone is logged in.