Programmatic Method For Opening Ports - port

I've searched this subject in stackoverflow and found out that a telnet library would help, and I found a telnet lib here: C# Telnet Library
but I don't know how I can use a telnet library to open a port in my router. I'm using an AT&T 2wire router. Any hints on how I can do this?

You can't. The 2wire router is an island unto itself, if it decides to block a port nothing external can (or should) be able to change that. You are on the wrong track, and would need to restate your goals in order to get a useful answer.
UPnP and other "Hole Punching" techniques do exist: but you'll be in a world of hurt if you try to reply on them for any widespread deployment.
Perhaps you meant to open a connection to a remote server and then establish two way communication. That is easy... and how other games and tools get the job done.

Technically speaking you should not be able to. You shouldn't have outside programatic access to a router to open a port if it's blocked.
If what you mean is opening a port for communication (that is not blocked) then you can simply create Sockets with the address and port (ex. localhost 7777) to establish inter process communication or simply communication with another server.
As I mentioned in a comment below there are ports that are available for use (in C# this can be easily tested, a quick google search will find you many snippets of code for testing if a port is open). A simple approach is to simply start at port 1024 (I believe this is the correct lower bound for ports that should be used by applications, someone correct me if I'm wrong) and just start counting up until you find a port that is available, if you find you've reached some upper limit you can simply report that a connection cannot be made. I hope this clears up a little more and if I have time I will try to find some code I have for this and edit it in but honestly a quick search can net you similar code for checking ports in C#.

Related

How to specify the source port for an http request in iOS

I know that it's an unusual thing to need to do, but I need to specify the SOURCE port to be used in an outgoing http(s) request in iOS. I know that there are many different 'standard' ways to send http(s) requests -- from what I understand the most usual involve NSURLConnection and NSURLSession, but I couldn't see if I can specify the source port. Is it possible to somehow use a socket interface to create the socket and then use this socket with NSURLConnection or NSURLSession?
Or perhaps (as a hack) can one specify the ephemeral port range that my app can use (so I'll restrict it to a range of 5 or 10 ports)?
As a last grasping at straws: is there some ip masquerading or other rules that are available on the iOS device that the app could use to ensure that the source port is correct? (I suppose one could write a process which just does masquerading by hand to the correct fixed port -- essentially write a local http forwarding proxy -- is that my only possibility?)
I don't need any fancy feature or control of these http(s) requests except that they need to come from a certain very narrow range of port numbers.
thanks very much.
If you want to ask why I have such a stupid requirement, please feel free to ask privately -- but don't clutter up this question. THanks!!
I note that just a year ago, iOS: how to get the http connection's source port was asked, but that asked about READING the ephemeral port chosen by the system.
thanks

Transferring incoming communication to another computer

I have two computers, A and B.
On computer A, I want to be able to specify for certain ports that incoming traffic from computers will be automatically routed to a different port on computer B as if it was originally sent to B from .
I'm not really sure what I need here. I thought it might be port forwarding, bridge, ip routing or ip forwarding but was unable to come to a conclusion.
I'm trying to do this on a Windows 2008 machine, in order to shift traffic from an older software on one server to a newer software on a different server. I tested my trials using http://joncraton.org/blog/46/netcat-for-windows, trying to send stuff from my computer to another computer which was supposed to route it back to me, but nothing was received.
I have tried:
http://www.simpleportforwarding.com
but that didn't work for me.
I've also tried:
http://www.quantumg.net/portforward.php
but my Anti-virus blocks it (though it's not a malware, as far as I know).
I know Windows has the command "route" on the shell but I'm not really sure what to do with it as it requires a mask for the IP and doesn't seem to allow choosing ports (and it might not be what I need anyway).
I've also come across this:
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/NAT_Windows_2003_Setup_Configuration.html
and though I'm pretty sure NAT is not what I need, maybe that "Roles" configuration has something relevant.
Had anyone come across a similar situation and knows how to solve this? I'm pretty sure there's something ready which can do this and no software needs to be written.
EDIT:
I've discovered that netsh can do the above by:
C:\>netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=12345 listenaddress=192.168.1.1 connectport=443 connectaddress=192.168.1.1
which is a command I found here:
http://www.rickwargo.com/2011/01/08/port-forwarding-port-mapping-on-windows-server-2008-r2/
But the problem is, and I forgot to mention this, I also need to be able to do this routing only for specific source IP addresses. I'm not sure if netsh can do this (maybe it can?) so is there any other way?

How to look for any and all computers on a network which are using my service?

I have a custom pair of client/server sockets (TJDServerSocket and TJDClientSocket) which wrap the TServerSocket and TClientSocket in the ScktComp unit. I don't have any issues to fix, but would like to know something. I'd like to add a feature to the client side to automatically search the network for any instances of a server socket (specifically my server component).
I'm open to any suggestions, but has to be specific to the use of the ScktComp unit in Delphi 7.
Here's a link to the components of mine.
Never used the TServerSocket and TClientSocket myself, and I don't have the help files within reach, so I can't immediately see if this would work with those components.
For a project I did I needed something like that too. I ended up with using UDP to broadcast a discovery request (within the same subnet of course). The server, listening on a particular port for such a request, would reply its data back. When multiple servers would exist (a situation that though rare could occur) the client just picked the server with the required service(s) and the least load. That load was part of the data the server send back.
It worked out nice, wasn't all that difficult to write, and turned out reasonably efficient too.
The request protocol is completely up to you. The one I devised allowed clients to send a request detailing the services they need, and servers replying listing their services and the load (= connected clients in active use).
After selecting the server to talk to, a client would register itself for the services it needed, and could use them after that.
Hope this helps.
There are some standard protocols for service discovery. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking
Mailslots is a nice option here. It'll broadcast to every PC on your subnet. See Jeroen's answer to this question:
Suggestions on writing a TCP IP messaging system (Client/Server) using Delphi 2010
Searching is as easy as port scanning.
If you don't like the brute force approach, the server can register itself to a well known service application (could be a web server), and the client can connect to the service application to ask. It's quieter than broadcasting.
With more information, such as details about the network (who's it for?), I can suggest a more precise answer.

Is there a Ruby API for manipulating packet filtering chains a la iptables?

I've been crashing around on the netfilter/iptables home page as well as beseeching The Google, but no luck so far.
I have a Rails application which needs to control packet filtering for its Linux host. It could do this by just dumping rules into /etc/sysconfig/iptables and bouncing the iptables startup script, of course. But it would be sweeter if it could just seamlessly make the calls via an API.
The app's requirements are actually very very simple; it only needs to add and delete ACCEPT rules for a given source IP address to a given TCP port on the server, to control access to that service.
I found references to a ruby-iptables project, but that apparently went moribund some years ago.
If I have to resort to raw getsocketopt() calls and the like, I'll just do the text-file-and-restart approach, which will offend my Slickness Sensor but make my customer smile, because he likes working software better than really elegant software that will work Very Soon Now.
If you search for "ruby netfilter" there's more to be found. NetFilter (http://netfilter.org/) is the underlying framework behind iptables.
http://rubyipq.rubyforge.org/ (traffic shaping)
https://github.com/johnl/netfilter.rb (DSL)
http://rubyforge.org/projects/iptcext/ (IPTC library interface)
The last is most like what you want, but while there's code, there doesn't seem to be a real release.

How can I transload data between two delphi applications over internet?

Hi
let me make my question clear. Two people using my app are connected to the internet. Both have each other's IP and they want to chat (like Y!messanger) with each other.
I think I need to use Indy components; right? Which component should I use?
Thanks in advance
Have you looked at any of the demos on Indy's website yet?
In general, you are looking to create a "Client/Server" type application. A quick Google search for "indy client server example" pulls up lots of results, including this one: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Delphi-Kylix/A-Real-World-Client-Server-Application-in-Delphi/
In reality, this gets a lot more complicated when you have firewalls and NATs with private IP addresses. You will have to consider how your application will either get around or through these types of technologies.
Similar to what Scott said, I think that your biggest problem is getting them talking to each other. My computers at home go through a router, which blocks all incoming connection requests (i.e. requests to start a conversation between two computers) from the Internet. My computers can send connection requests OUT, and start a conversation that way, but unless you modify the router (port forwarding) my computers can not receive connection requests.
You need a server somewhere to which both people will connect, that can then relay messages back and forth. To get really tricky, once the connection is made to the server the two computers can then be put into direct contact, but that involves UDP packets and some clever magic.
You don't have to use Indy components, you just need anything that will handle communications over the network. Any HTTP or sockets network stack will do. Indy is the defacto standard for Delphi Win32.
To do network communications, you will need to create a listener object or service on machine A and a sender object on machine B to send a network message from A to B. To send a message from B to A, you will need a reverse path as well - 4 objects total to perform bidirectional comms. Some object wrappers hide this detail internally. I don't recall offhand whether Indy hides this or not.
It would probably be easiest if you use a common TCP/IP protocol for your machine to machine communications, such as HTTP. This will make it easier to get your connections through firewalls and proxies that frequently exist between arbitrary users. To avoid conflicting with any HTTP web services that might be running on either machine, you should use a custom port number with the IP address: 192.168.1.10:12345, not the standard HTTP web server port 80. This is what most of the IM clients do.

Resources