I have to code a server app where clients open a TCP/IP socket, send some data and close the connection.
The data packets are small < 100 bytes, however there is talk of having them batch their transactions and send multiple packets.
How can I best simulate a dial-up ut connection (using Delphi & Indy components, just FYI)?
Is it as simple as
open connection
wait a while (what is the definition of "a while"?)
close connection
You can use a network emulator. If you have a Linux machine on hand with NISTnet (an old project but still useful, used some years ago) you can create multiple scnearios limiting bandwidth or other characteristics to the network communication. There is an application called WANEM which seems to do the same but I have not used it so cannot tell you if is good or not.
If you want a modem emulation the you can use com0com which provides exactly that.
Related
I have a program in Delphi 6 which connects to an industrial device (2d barcode scanner), using TCP/IP on a specific port. The scanner socket is not connected all the time, only when operator performs a certain operation. At that time, I would like to connect to the scanner, or show that it's offline (example: someone could have taken the cable out).
I have
IDScannerConnection: TIdTelnet;
Assuming connection is not available - wrong IP setting, cable out, wrong port, ... : If I just do IDScannerConnection.connect; Windows will freeze the program until it times out, which is several long seconds. Even inside a try/except.
I have tried the procedure here but it does not register if connection is available.
So, what's the best approach ? Connection to said device is using Telnet, to get an even when data is available. I can run a console program externally if I have to. In general I am fairly flexible around solutions, as long as operator does not experience a long timeout.
Unfortunately I am stuck in D6 and Indy9, can't upgrade these at the moment.
I am currently working with one of Growatt inverters, 5 KVA residential inverter, It has two ports one is RS-485 I have connected a Smart Energy Meter with it to control backpower flowing to grid, and on the other port Growatt wifi device was working, I wanted to use my own platform, I used this protocol Growatt PV Inverter Modbus RS-485 RTU Protocol and then connected wire to RS-232 with a Raspberry Pi to read the data and send it back to my server. Now the issue coming is as soon as both devices start to work then inverter starts showing an error. I cannot understand why it was not giving with the Growatt device. Is there any solution?
I want to ask some question about your problem to help you if I can :-).
Are you going to monitor inverter data on your server? If yes => so, why you don't connect your server to inverter directly (I mean by using USB to the RS-485 converter).
What is your connection type? If it is Modbus-RTU you need to find Modbus register map to get your desired data. You could find this in the inverter user manual.
Be careful about your Modbus communication configurations and settings (i.e. Baudrate, ID, Parity and Byte Size).
I'm trying to write a simple C code with WinPcap to broadcast a beacon packet and capture it in all nearby WiFi units. The code I'm using is very similar to the ones available at WinPcap[1].
The code runs fine if I create an ad-hoc network connection and join all the computers into it. However, this process of creating and joining to an ad-hoc network is cumbersome. It would be much better if, regardless of what network each computer is in, the beacon packets would be broadcasted and captured once the code is running.
As simple as this problem might sound, after some searching it seems that this is not possible to be done on windows (unless re-writing drivers or maybe the kernel):
Raw WiFi Packets with WinPcap[2]
Sending packets without network connection[3]
Does winpcap/libpcap allow me to send raw wireless packets?[4]
Basically, it would be necessary to use the WiFi in monitor mode, which is not supported in Windows[5]. Therefore, if the computers are not in the same network connection, the packets will be discarded.
1st Issue
I'm still intriguing, beacon and probe request packets are a normal traffic across the network. How they could be being sent and received constantly but the user is not allowed to write a program to do so? How to reconcile that?
2nd Issue
Does anyone has experience with Managed Wifi API[6]? I've heard that it might help.
3rd Issue
Acrylic WiFi[7] claims to have developed a NDIS driver which support monitor mode under Windows. Does anyone has experience with this software? Is it possible to integrate with C codes?
4th Issue
Is it possible to code such Wifi beacon on Linux? and on Android?
www.winpcap.org/docs/docs_412/html/main.html
stackoverflow.com/questions/34454592/raw-wifi-packets-with-winpcap/34461313?noredirect=1#comment56674673_34461313
stackoverflow.com/questions/25631060/sending-packets-without-network-connection-wireless-adapter
stackoverflow.com/questions/7946497/does-winpcap-libpcap-allow-me-to-send-raw-wireless-packets
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_mode#Operating_system_support
managedwifi.codeplex.com/
www.acrylicwifi.com/
Couple questions I will try to answer. Mgmt and Ctrl packets are used for running a wifi network and don't contain data, I would not call these normal packets. Windows used to(I think still does) convert data packets into ethernet frames and pass it up the stack. Beacon and Probe Req pkts are not necessary for TCP/IP stack to work, ie. web browsers don't need beacon frames to get your web page. Most OS's need minimal info from mgmt/ctrl pkts to help a user interact with a wifi adapter, most mgmt/ctrl pkts only are useful to the driver(and low level os components) to figure how to interact with the network. This way the wifi adapters look and act like ethernet adapters to high level os components.
Never had any experience with Managed Wifi API or Acrylic, so can't give you any feedback.
Most analyzers that capture and send packets do it in 2-3 separate modes mainly because of hardware. Wifi adapters can be in listen mode(promiscuous mode and/or monitor mode) or adapter mode. To capture network traffic you need to listen and not send, ie. if someone sends a pkt while you are sending you miss that traffic. In order to capture(or send) traffic you will need a custom NDIS driver in windows, on linux many of them already do. Checkout wireshark or tshark, they use winpcap to capture pkts in windows and there are some adapters they recommend to use to capture pkts.
Yes it is possible to send a beacon on linux, ie. Aireplay. I know its possible to capture traffic on Android but you it needs to have rooted or custom firmware, which I would believe also means you can send custom pkts. If you are simply trying to send a pkt it might be easier to capture some traffic in tshark or wireshark and use something like aireplay to resend that traffic. You could also edit the packet with a hex editor to tune it to what you need.
I want to implement a demo application to listen data via TCP/IP.
Data Transmitter will transmit a series or ASCII char or a series of string all the time. It feeds data into TCP/IP address (eg. 127.0.0.1:22) This could be a GPS transmitter.
I want to implement a demo application for receiving data by clicking the start button and listening to the data via TCP/IP and display it accordingly.
Correct me if I am wrong, I don't think I can use Server/Client server for this purpose. I tried to create a client application with TIdTcpClient, it receives only one time data. I don't think Indy has a TCP listening component.
Thanks in advance.
If you wanna monitor network comunications between some device and some other program on your computer using of TIdTCPServer won't work. Why? Once Indy will read network data it will mark it as processed and delete it from network buffer. So that data probably won't even reach to the other program on your computer. Workaround for this is that you design your application to actually work similar as network bridge. Your application listens to the data on one port and then forwards that data on another port on which the other program is listening. But the main problem is that you have to make this to work both ways.
What you need is somekind of a component which is able to peek at the network data but don't interact with it. This is usually done on driver level.
Now if it is not abolutely necessary to have such functionality in your own software but you are only interested in getting the data I recomend you try Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/). Wireshark is a verry powerfull freware software which alows you to monitor all netwrok traffic on basically all protocols without causing any interuptions. In order for this software to work it instals special driver which serves for intercepting the network data.
Maybe you would want to use same driver in your application if this functionality needs to be in your application.
Based on your diagram I think that your implementation could also be based on a message-oriented middleware, using a message broker which receives the GPS transmitter or other data.
The message broker would then store the data internally and forward it to all interested clients which are connected. A typical messaging pattern in this case is a "Topic", which broadcasts the messages similar to a radio station.
So the middleware will ensure that the information will be collected (optionally also persisted to disk) and then guarantees the delivery to the receivers. This can be done even in a way where receivers which have been off-line for a while still receive the GPS messages created while they where not listening ('retroactive consumers').
There are many popular free open source message brokers, and most of them also can be used with Delphi.
I have a server application that receives some special TCP packet from a client and needs to react to it as soon as possible by sending an high-level ACK to the client (the TCP ACK won't suite my needs).
However, this server is really network intensive and sometimes the packet will take too long to be sent (like 200ms in a local network, when a simple server application can send it in less than 1ms).
Is there a way to mark this packet with a high-priority tag or something like that in Delphi? Or maybe with the Win32 API?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT
Thanks for all the answers so far. I'll add some details. My product has the following setup: there are several devices that are built upon vehicles with WIFI conectivity. When they arrive at the garage, those device connect to my server and start to transmit data.
Because of hardware limitations, I implemented a high-level ACK to make the device aware that the last packet arrived successfully (please, don't argue about this - the data may be broken even if I got a correct TCP ACK). However, if I use my server software, that communicates with a remote database, to issue this ACK, I get very long delay (>200ms). If I use an exclusive software to do this task, I get small latencies (<1ms). So, I was imagining if I could just tell Windows to send those special packets first, as it seems to me that this package is getting delayed so the database ones can get delivered.
That's the motivation behind my question.
EDIT 2
As requested: this is legacy software and I'm using the legacy dclsockets140.bpl package and Delphi 2010 (14.0.3593.25826).
IMO it is very difficult to realize this. there are a lot of equipment and software involved. first of all, if you communicate between 2 different OS's you got a latency. second, soft and hard firewalls, antiviruses, everything is filtering/delaying your package.
you can try also to 'hack' the system(this involve some very good knowledge on how the frames/segments are packed/send,flow control,congestion,etc), either by altering it from code, either by using some tools like http://half-open.com/ or others.
In short, passing MSG_OOB flag to the send function marks the data as "urgent". Detailed discussion about the OOB in the context of Windows Sockets implementation specifics is available here.