Java socket blocks on connection to a server - java

I am trying to connect to server using a Java socket. I am trying to connect from port 80 to 90
int port;
Socket clientsocket;
String hostname = "www.google.com";
for(port = 80;port<=90; port++){
try{
clientsocket = new Socket(hostname,port);
System.out.println("Connection at port " + port + "\t" + clientsocket.isConnected());
clientsocket.close();
}
catch(Exception e){
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
}
When I try to connect to any website like google.com or w3schools.com my program hangs on the socket() call for port numbers except 80.
Since those websites are not serving on ports 81-90 it should raise exception but instead it gets blocked. For port 80 it works fine.
When I try to connect to the apache server installed on my machine, it doesn't block for any port number and gives me Connection refused error which is the obvious behavior.
So why is it happening. Thanks in advance.

When I try to connect to any website like google.com or w3schools.com my program hangs on the socket() call for port numbers except 80. Since those websites are not serving on ports 81-90 it should raise exception but instead it gets blocked.
This is almost certainly not Java's doing.
When you invoke the Socket(String, int) constructor, the JVM asks the OS to attempt to establish a connection to the IP address corresponding to the supplied name, using the supplied port number. Assuming that we're talking TCP/IP, the OS sends off a TCP 'SYN' message, and waits for a response:
If the response is a 'SYN-ACK', it proceeds to establish the connection as per the protocol; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Connection_establishment.
If the response is an 'RST' (reset), the connect fails and this results in a Java "connection refused" exception. (This is typically what happens if the 'SYN' makes it to the remote server, only to discover that there is no application "listening" on the port you tried to connect on.)
If the response is an ICMP message of some kind (e.g. ICMP destination unreachable), this typically results in an immediate failure of the connection request, and a Java exception.
If there is no response, the OS tries again, and again, and again. Depending on the Java default connect timeout (or the explicit timeout), this process could continue for a long time.
So what is most likely happening is that something is filtering the 'SYN' messages on funky ports, and simply throwing them away. It could be the local firewall software on your PC, firewall software in your gateway, or your ISP's network, or software in the remote system you are attempting to talk to. Or this could be happening to the 'SYN-ACK' message coming back.
Either way, the blocking / timeout behavior is inherent to TCP/IP networking, and it is impossible to accurately diagnose at either the OS or Java levels. You simply need to adjust your expectations. (Or set a shorter connect timeout ...)

For this case, and any case:
/**
* Create end point and initialize connection with custom timeout for refused or server offline
*/
try{
InetSocketAddress endPoint = new InetSocketAddress(serverAddress, portNumber);
Socket socket = new Socket();
socket.connect(endPoint, 10000);
} catch(Exception e){
//... Handle connection error
}

Related

How do i find if (java) socket is still valid? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Java socket API: How to tell if a connection has been closed?
(9 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
When I'm using e.g. PuTTY and my connection gets lost (or when I do a manual ipconfig /release on Windows), it responds directly and notifies my connection was lost.
I want to create a Java program which monitors my Internet connection (to some reliable server), to log the date/times when my internet fails.
I tried use the Socket.isConnected() method but that will just forever return "true". How can I do this in Java?
Well, the best way to tell if your connection is interrupted is to try to read/write from the socket. If the operation fails, then you have lost your connection sometime.
So, all you need to do is to try reading at some interval, and if the read fails try reconnecting.
The important events for you will be when a read fails - you lost connection, and when a new socket is connected - you regained connection.
That way you can keep track of up time and down time.
Even though TCP/IP is "connection oriented" protocol, normally no data is sent over an idle connection. You can have a socket open for a year without a single bit sent over it by the IP stack. In order to notice that a connection is lost, you have to send some data on the application level.(*) You can try this out by unplugging the phone cable from your ADSL modem. All connections in your PC should stay up, unless the applications have some kind of application level keepalive mechanism.
So the only way to notice lost connection is to open TCP connection to some server and read some data from it. Maybe the most simple way could be to connect to some FTP server and fetch a small file - or directory listing - once in a while. I have never seen a generic server which was really meant to be used for this case, and owners of the FTP server may not like clients doing this.
(*) There is also a mechanism called TCP keepalive but in many OS's you have to activate it for all applications, and it is not really practical to use if you want to notice loss of connection quickly
If the client disconnects properly, a read() will return -1, readLine() returns null, readXXX() for any other X throws EOFException. The only reliable way to detect a lost TCP connection is to write to it. Eventually this will throw an IOException 'connection reset', but it takes at least two writes due to buffering.
Why not use the isReachable() method of the java.net.InetAddress class?
How this works is JVM implementation specific but:
A typical implementation will use ICMP ECHO REQUESTs if the privilege can be obtained, otherwise it will try to establish a TCP connection on port 7 (Echo) of the destination host.
If you want to keep a connection open continually so you can see when that fails you could connect to server running the ECHO protocol yourself rather than having isReachable() do it for you and read and write data and wait for it to fail.
You might want to try looking at the socket timeout interval. With a short timeout (I believe the default is 'infinite timeout') then you might be able to trap an exception or something when the host becomes unreachable.
Okay so I finally got it working with
try
{
Socket s = new Socket("stackoverflow.com",80);
DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(s.getOutputStream());
DataInputStream is = new DataInputStream(s.getInputStream());
while (true)
{
os.writeBytes("GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\n\n");
is.available();
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
}
catch (IOException e)
{
System.out.println("connection probably lost");
e.printStackTrace();
}
Not as clean as I hoped but it's not working if I leave out the os.writeBytes().
You could ping a machine every number of seconds, and this would be pretty accurate. Be careful that you don't DOS it.
Another alternative would be run a small server on a remote machine and keep a connection to it.
Its probably simpler to connect to yahoo/google or somewhere like this.
URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
URLConnection yc = yahoo.openConnection();
int dataLen = yc.getContentLength() ;
Neil
The isConnected()method inside Socket.java class is a little misleading. It does not tell you if the socket is currently connected to a remote host (like if it is unclosed). Instead, it tells you whether the socket has ever been connected to a remote host. If the socket was able to connect to the remote host at all, this method returns true, even after that socket has been closed. To tell if a socket is currently open, you need to check that isConnected() returns true and isClosed() returns false.
For example:
boolean connected = socket.isConnected() && !socket.isClosed();

Java: How to properly close a socket connection using ServerSocket and Socket

I currently have a simple instant messaging program which is utilizing Java's Socket and ServerSocket classes. It is functioning as intended but when I attempt to close the connection it is not using the 4 way handshake TCP teardown to close the connection. Instead it is closing the connection abruptly with an RST packet.
The way in which I am closing the connection is sending a string from the client to the server which the server will recognize as the command to close the connection. I then use the ServerSocket.close() method on the server and the Socket.close() method on the client.
What is the correct way and/or order of events to properly close a TCP connection utilizing these classes?
Client side disconnect code:
//Disconnects from remote server
//Returns true on success, false on failure
public boolean disconnect(){
try{
this.clientOut.println("0x000000");
this.clientRemoteSocket.close();
this.isConnected = false;
return true;
}catch(Exception e){
return false;
}
}
Server side disconnect code:
//Check to see if the client wants to close the connection
//If yes, then close the connection and break out of the while loop
if(incoming.equals("0x000000")){
serverLocalSocket.close();
break;
}
EDIT:
The code works perfectly fine. I'm just trying to learn socket programming in Java and know that a proper TCP teardown process is to include a 4 way handshake. A FIN packet to the remote host, then an ACK packet from the remote host back. Then a FIN packet from the remote host, then an ACK packet to the remote host. When monitoring the traffic via Wireshark I am not getting that. Instead I am getting a FIN to the remote server, then a RST/ACK back from the server.
This image depicts a proper TCP 4 way teardown process.
So far everything I've found suggest that all one needs is a call to close() or to just let Java's Try-with-resources statement handle the clean up. I can't see Java implementing functionality which does not comply with the standard TCP specifications though. It is very possible I may be calling certain lines in an incorrect order or something of the sort, I'm just unaware of it.
If you are resetting your own connection on close, either:
You haven't read all the pending incoming data that was sent by the peer, or
You had already written to the connection which had previously already been closed by the peer.
In both cases, an application protocol error.
The great part about TCP is if you close your socket, your partner will automatically know and throw an error on reading.
So all you have to do in the client is:
clientRemoteSocket.close();
And with the server, just add an error case to your normal reading of data:
try {
// Read from the socket:
incoming = socketInputStream.read();
// Handle the data here
} catch (IOException e) {
// Client has disconnected
}
There might be a more specfic exception you can catch, I'm not sure, it's been a while. But that should work. Good luck!

Should I close sockets from both ends?

I have the following problem. My client program monitor for availability of server in the local network (using Bonjour, but it does not rally mater). As soon as a server is "noticed" by the client application, the client tries to create a socket: Socket(serverIP,serverPort);.
At some point the client can loose the server (Bonjour says that server is not visible in the network anymore). So, the client decide to close the socket, because it is not valid anymore.
At some moment the server appears again. So, the client tries to create a new socket associated with this server. But! The server can refuse to create this socket since it (server) has already a socket associated with the client IP and client port. It happens because the socket was closed by the client, not by the server. Can it happen? And if it is the case, how this problem can be solved?
Well, I understand that it is unlikely that the client will try to connect to the server from the same port (client port), since client selects its ports randomly. But it still can happen (just by chance). Right?
Yes, close the socket, as soon as you detect a failure.
The socket will be "stuck" in "close_wait" if not closed properly.
Even if the socket is closed, it's state will be in time_wait for a short period.
However, if You design the application to use a different local port for each new connection, there is no need to wait for the old socket to be closed.
(As you are then creating a completly different socket, since a socket is identified by the remote-ip, remote port, local ip and local port.)
A quick/ dirty illustration of why this can't happen (note the client forcibly uses the same local port in its connection):
public class Server{
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
new Thread(){
java.net.ServerSocket server = new java.net.ServerSocket(12345);
java.util.ArrayList<java.net.Socket> l = new java.util.ArrayList<java.net.Socket>();
public void run() {
try{
while(true){
java.net.Socket client = server.accept();
System.out.println("Connection Accepted: S: "+client.getLocalPort()+", C: "+client.getPort());
l.add(client);
}
}catch(Exception e){e.printStackTrace();}
}
}.start();
}
and a client (replace server address with something valid):
import java.net.InetAddress;
import java.net.Socket;
public class SocketTest {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
InetAddress server = InetAddress.getByName("192.168.0.256");
InetAddress localhost = InetAddress.getLocalHost();
Socket s = new Socket(server, 12345, localhost, 54321);
System.out.println("Client created socket");
s.close();
s = null;
System.gc();
System.gc();
Thread.sleep(1000);
s = new Socket(server, 12345, localhost, 54321);
System.out.println("Client created second socket");
s.close();
System.exit(55);
}
}
If you start the server and then try to run the client the first connection will succeed, but the second will fail with a "java.net.BindException: Address already in use: connect"
Short answer: yes, you should close socket on both ends.
Although the answer is simple, in reality it may be very hard to detect that the peer has stopped responding if you don't build some ACK/NACK scheme into your client-server protocol.
Even with your protocol ACKs your processing thread may be hanging waiting for ACKs that will never come from the client or vice versa.
If you use Blocking I/O, I would start by setting read timeouts on a socket. Unfortunately, if the peer becomes unresponsive, there is no corresponding time-out for the writes.
One blunt instrument that I found has value in our environment is to create blocking Sockets through java.nio methods and then interrupt the processing thread at configurable intervals.
Interrupting processing thread will close socket, but if you pick the timeout large enough you will know that there is a trouble. We chose this approach because application was written initially with blocking I/O and a cost to transition it to non-blocking was very high.
With the non-blocking I/O, though, you may check at a finer-grained interval the status of your connection and react more intelligently to the slow/unresponsive connections.
Though non-blocking I/O requires a higher upfront investment, I think it will pay better dividends in terms of reliability and better throughput later on.
the client operating system will not allocate the same port to a new socket so soon. there are several mechanism that prevents it. one of which is the TIME_WAIT state that reserves the port for some time after the connection is closed.
I wouldn't worry about it.
if you really need to detect disconnection you will have to implement ping/pong protocol, initiated by both the client and the server.
It sounds like your client is detecting loss of connectivity to the server (using Bonjour), but you don't have the corresponding capability in the other direction.
You're certainly going to want some kind of timeout for inactive connections on the server side as well, otherwise dead connections will hang around forever. Beyond the problem of potential IP address/port # collisions you mention, there's also the fact that the dead connections are consuming OS and application resources (such as open file descriptors)
Conversely, you might also want to consider not being too aggressive in closing a connection from the client side when Bonjour says the service is no longer visible. If you're in a wireless scenario, a transient loss of connectivity isn't that uncommon, and it's possible for a TCP connection to remain open and valid after connectivity is restored (assuming the client still has the same IP address). The optimum strategy depends on what kind of connection you're talking about. If it's a relatively stateless connection where the cost of discarding the connection and retrying is low (like HTTP), then it makes sense to toss the connection at the first sign of trouble. But if it's a long-lived connection with significant user state (like an SSH login session), it makes sense to try harder to keep the connection alive.
If you close server socket only in case of blocking socket then client socket will be closed but not vice versa.
otherwise it would be better socket in both end. Because socket is a heavy weigt for you system. It will use a local port and a remote port of your system forever.
Thanks
Sunil Kumar Sahoo

Java detect lost connection [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Java socket API: How to tell if a connection has been closed?
(9 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
When I'm using e.g. PuTTY and my connection gets lost (or when I do a manual ipconfig /release on Windows), it responds directly and notifies my connection was lost.
I want to create a Java program which monitors my Internet connection (to some reliable server), to log the date/times when my internet fails.
I tried use the Socket.isConnected() method but that will just forever return "true". How can I do this in Java?
Well, the best way to tell if your connection is interrupted is to try to read/write from the socket. If the operation fails, then you have lost your connection sometime.
So, all you need to do is to try reading at some interval, and if the read fails try reconnecting.
The important events for you will be when a read fails - you lost connection, and when a new socket is connected - you regained connection.
That way you can keep track of up time and down time.
Even though TCP/IP is "connection oriented" protocol, normally no data is sent over an idle connection. You can have a socket open for a year without a single bit sent over it by the IP stack. In order to notice that a connection is lost, you have to send some data on the application level.(*) You can try this out by unplugging the phone cable from your ADSL modem. All connections in your PC should stay up, unless the applications have some kind of application level keepalive mechanism.
So the only way to notice lost connection is to open TCP connection to some server and read some data from it. Maybe the most simple way could be to connect to some FTP server and fetch a small file - or directory listing - once in a while. I have never seen a generic server which was really meant to be used for this case, and owners of the FTP server may not like clients doing this.
(*) There is also a mechanism called TCP keepalive but in many OS's you have to activate it for all applications, and it is not really practical to use if you want to notice loss of connection quickly
If the client disconnects properly, a read() will return -1, readLine() returns null, readXXX() for any other X throws EOFException. The only reliable way to detect a lost TCP connection is to write to it. Eventually this will throw an IOException 'connection reset', but it takes at least two writes due to buffering.
Why not use the isReachable() method of the java.net.InetAddress class?
How this works is JVM implementation specific but:
A typical implementation will use ICMP ECHO REQUESTs if the privilege can be obtained, otherwise it will try to establish a TCP connection on port 7 (Echo) of the destination host.
If you want to keep a connection open continually so you can see when that fails you could connect to server running the ECHO protocol yourself rather than having isReachable() do it for you and read and write data and wait for it to fail.
You might want to try looking at the socket timeout interval. With a short timeout (I believe the default is 'infinite timeout') then you might be able to trap an exception or something when the host becomes unreachable.
Okay so I finally got it working with
try
{
Socket s = new Socket("stackoverflow.com",80);
DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(s.getOutputStream());
DataInputStream is = new DataInputStream(s.getInputStream());
while (true)
{
os.writeBytes("GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\n\n");
is.available();
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
}
catch (IOException e)
{
System.out.println("connection probably lost");
e.printStackTrace();
}
Not as clean as I hoped but it's not working if I leave out the os.writeBytes().
You could ping a machine every number of seconds, and this would be pretty accurate. Be careful that you don't DOS it.
Another alternative would be run a small server on a remote machine and keep a connection to it.
Its probably simpler to connect to yahoo/google or somewhere like this.
URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
URLConnection yc = yahoo.openConnection();
int dataLen = yc.getContentLength() ;
Neil
The isConnected()method inside Socket.java class is a little misleading. It does not tell you if the socket is currently connected to a remote host (like if it is unclosed). Instead, it tells you whether the socket has ever been connected to a remote host. If the socket was able to connect to the remote host at all, this method returns true, even after that socket has been closed. To tell if a socket is currently open, you need to check that isConnected() returns true and isClosed() returns false.
For example:
boolean connected = socket.isConnected() && !socket.isClosed();

Why would a "java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out" exception occur when URL is up?

I'm getting a ConnectException: Connection timed out with some frequency from my code. The URL I am trying to hit is up. The same code works for some users, but not others. It seems like once one user starts to get this exception they continue to get the exception.
Here is the stack trace:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:516)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:466)
at sun.net.NetworkClient.doConnect(NetworkClient.java:157)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:365)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.openServer(HttpClient.java:477)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.<init>(HttpClient.java:214)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:287)
at sun.net.www.http.HttpClient.New(HttpClient.java:299)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getNewHttpClient(HttpURLConnection.java:796)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.plainConnect(HttpURLConnection.java:748)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.connect(HttpURLConnection.java:673)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getOutputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:840)
Here is a snippet from my code:
URLConnection urlConnection = null;
OutputStream outputStream = null;
OutputStreamWriter outputStreamWriter = null;
InputStream inputStream = null;
try {
URL url = new URL(urlBase);
urlConnection = url.openConnection();
urlConnection.setDoOutput(true);
outputStream = urlConnection.getOutputStream(); // exception occurs on this line
outputStreamWriter = new OutputStreamWriter(outputStream);
outputStreamWriter.write(urlString);
outputStreamWriter.flush();
inputStream = urlConnection.getInputStream();
String response = IOUtils.toString(inputStream);
return processResponse(urlString, urlBase, response);
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new Exception("Error querying url: " + urlString, e);
} finally {
IoUtil.close(inputStream);
IoUtil.close(outputStreamWriter);
IoUtil.close(outputStream);
}
Connection timeouts (assuming a local network and several client machines) typically result from
a) some kind of firewall on the way that simply eats the packets without telling the sender things like "No Route to host"
b) packet loss due to wrong network configuration or line overload
c) too many requests overloading the server
d) a small number of simultaneously available threads/processes on the server which leads to all of them being taken. This happens especially with requests that take a long time to run and may combine with c).
If the URL works fine in the web browser on the same machine, it might be that the Java code isn't using the HTTP proxy the browser is using for connecting to the URL.
The error message says it all: your connection timed out. This means your request did not get a response within some (default) timeframe. The reasons that no response was received is likely to be one of:
a) The IP/domain or port is incorrect
b) The IP/domain or port (i.e service) is down
c) The IP/domain is taking longer than your default timeout to respond
d) You have a firewall that is blocking requests or responses on whatever port you are using
e) You have a firewall that is blocking requests to that particular host
f) Your internet access is down
g) Your live-server is down i.e in case of "rest-API call".
Note that firewalls and port or IP blocking may be in place by your ISP
I'd recommend raising the connection timeout time before getting the output stream, like so:
urlConnection.setConnectTimeout(1000);
Where 1000 is in milliseconds (1000 milliseconds = 1 second).
try to do the Telnet to see any firewall issue
perform tracert/traceroute to find number of hops
I solved my problem with:
System.setProperty("https.proxyHost", "myProxy");
System.setProperty("https.proxyPort", "80");
or http.proxyHost...
Why would a “java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out”
exception occur when URL is up?
Because the URLConnection (HttpURLConnection/HttpsURLConnection) is erratic. You can read about this here and here.
Our solution were two things:
a) set the ContentLength via setFixedLengthStreamingMode
b) catch any TimeoutException and retry if it failed.
This can be a IPv6 problem (the host publishes an IPv6 AAAA-Address and the users host thinks it is configured for IPv6 but it is actually not correctly connected). This can also be a network MTU problem, a firewall block, or the target host might publish different IP addresses (randomly or based on originators country) which are not all reachable. Or similliar network problems.
You cant do much besides setting a timeout and adding good error messages (especially printing out the hosts' resolved address). If you want to make it more robust add retry, parallel trying of all addresses and also look into name resolution caching (positive and negative) on the Java platform.
There is a possibility that your IP/host are blocked by the remote host, especially if it thinks you are hitting it too hard.
The reason why this happened to me was that a remote server was allowing only certain IP addressed but not its own, and I was trying to render the images from the server's URLs... so everything would simply halt, displaying the timeout error that you had...
Make sure that either the server is allowing its own IP, or that you are rendering things from some remote URL that actually exists.

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