In my application, I bind a socket to the port 38614.
While in test, I find sometime the port is used by another application.
So I failed to bind on it and get the error, "Address already in use".
I did some research, and find I could set the parameter /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_loca_port_range to reserve the port for my application.
So I add a new line "net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 50000 60000" to the file /etc/sysctl.conf.
Then I reboot the system.
But I still find a port 34660 out of the range which I set is used by some application.
[root#xxxx ~]# netstat -apn | grep fe80::cef1:3
tcp6 0 0 fe80::cef1:12345 fe80::cef1:34660 ESTABLISHED 2401/xxxx
So what should I do to reserve some ports for my application?
Could anyone give me some advice?
Another method is using a small port, such as 1001 which is not used by any other application, but I do not think it is a good idea for the ports smaller than 1024 are reserved for well-known ports.
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I have found the answer of the question "how do I reserve ports for my application?"
While I don't think it is a good idea, for it is difficult to make sure that our application runs earlier than any other application. Actually my application has to start after another application which does some prepare for my application.
The linux system may assign any port in the port pool to any application when it need a port.
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The parameter "ip_local_reserved_ports" is similar to "ip_local_port_range", they are in the same folder, and it is much more difficult to be tested. In my test the parameter "ip_local_port_range" doesn't work as our expect, so I don't believe the "ip_local_reserved_ports" is ok.
B.R.
Forward
The idea to reserve the port is to block the usage of this port for an outgoing connection. I mean if you have a potential service that will open for LISTEN the port 8080, if you don't reserve it, and the range of ports include this port, could conflict with a outgoing connection that randomly uses 8080 as "source port".
I'm quoting answers of how do I reserve ports for my application?
You could try with:
sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_reserved_ports = 49000, 49001
drop it in /etc/sysctl.conf, and then run sysctl -p.
To ensure the kernel won't give out 49000 and 49001 to clients as you wish to use them for your servers on linux.
Note that this is untested.
However, this is the accepted answer to the question:
Technically, there's no such thing as a "reserved port".
In TCP/UDP, the only way to "reserve" a port is to actually bind() a socket to it. A bound port will not be used by other applications; an unused port is, well, unused so other applications are free to use it.
If you are writing server software, then you can bind your sockets to specific ports as early as you want in the application code. Make the port numbers configurable, or at least clearly state them in the documentation, so that a systems administrator can quickly identify clashes and move conflicting applications to separate servers.
Related
I am writing an app that is to be running on a Windows PC. I need to create a server socket listening on 127.0.0.1, and another client socket which is to connect with this server socket.
Since the data exchange between the two sockets are within the same machine and there is no client connecting from outside of the machine, what port to use is insignificant, as long as the two sockets use the same port number.
So, how do I decide which port number to use? Shall it be a hard-coded port number such as 49500? What if another unrelated app on this machine happen to use this port number? Or shall I get the list of all used ports and programmatically pick an unused port?
Just want to know what is the best approach. Thanks.
ports within 0 to 1023 are generally controlled and you should assign your socket with higher port numbers, although in that range ports within 1024 and 49151 can be registered for others to be informed about that and not use them.
if you want to avoid conflicts you can see registered ports on your machine and assign a port number to your socket which is empty but ports higher than that (49152 to 65535) are completely free and are not even registered.
generally, it is not common to worry about that. for example, two major applications like VMware and apache web server operate on the same port number (443), and if you want to use VMware workstation and Xampp (which works with apache) you have to simply make one of them listen on another port and its not a big deal. so in my opinion the best practice is to let your users change this via a config file or something similar.
for further information, you can search google. for instance this link might be useful:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/registered-port#:~:text=Well%2Dknown%20ports%E2%80%94Ports%20in,1023%20are%20assigned%20and%20controlled.&text=Registered%20ports%E2%80%94Ports%20in%20the,be%20registered%20to%20prevent%20duplication.&text=Dynamic%20ports%E2%80%94Ports%20in%20the,assigned%2C%20controlled%2C%20or%20registered.
Let me be more specific about my question with an example: Let's say that I have a slew of little servers that all start up on different ports using TCPv4. These ports are going to be destination ports, of course. Let's further assume that these little servers don't just start up at boot time like a typical server, but rather they churn dynamically based on demand. They start up when needed, and may shut themselves down for a while, and then later start up again.
Now let's say that on this same computer, we also have lots of client processes making requests to server processes on other computers via TCPv4. When a client makes such a request, it is assigned a source port by the OS.
Let's say for the sake of this example that a client processes makes a web request to a RESTful server running on a different computer. Let's also say that the source port assigned by the OS to this request is port 7777.
For this example let's also say that while the above request is still occurring, one of our little servers wants to start up, and it wants to start up on destination port 7777.
My question is will this cause a conflict? I.e., will the server get an error because port 7777 is already in use? Or will everything be fine because these two different kinds of ports live in different address spaces that cannot conflict with each other?
One reason I'm worried about the potential for conflict here is that I've seen web pages that say that "ephemeral source port selection" is typically done in a port number range that begins at a relatively high number. Here is such a web page:
https://www.cymru.com/jtk/misc/ephemeralports.html
A natural assumption for why source ports would begin at high numbers, rather than just starting at 1, is to avoid conflict with the destination ports used by server processes. Though I haven't yet seen anything that explicitly comes out and says that this is the case.
P.S. There is, of course, a potential distinction between what the TCPv4 protocol spec has to say on this issue, and what OSes actually do. E.g., perhaps the protocol is agnostic, but OSes tend to only use a single address space? Or perhaps different OSes treat the issue differently?
Personally, I'm most interested at the moment in what Linux would do.
The TCP specification says that connections are identified by the tuple:
{local addr, local port, remote addr, remote port}
Based on this, there theoretically shouldn't be a conflict between a local port used in an existing connection and trying to bind that same port for a server to listen on, since the listening socket doesn't have a remote address/port (these are represented as wildcards in the spec).
However, most TCP implementations, including the Unix sockets API, are more strict than this. If the local port is already in use in any existing socket, you won't be able to bind it, you'll get the error EADDRINUSE. A special exception is made if the existing sockets are all in TIME_WAIT state and the new socket has the SO_REUSEADDR socket option; this is used to allow a server to restart while the sockets left over from a previous process are still waiting to time out.
For this reason, the port range is generally divided into ranges with different uses. When a socket doesn't bind a local port (either because it just called connect() without calling bind(), or by specifying IPPORT_ANY as the port in bind()), the port is chosen from the ephemeral range, which is usually very high numbered ports. Servers, on the other hand, are expected to bind to low-numbered ports. If network applications follow this convention, you should not run into conflicts.
I created tcp connection between client and server using nodejs (net module). Server is listening on already predefined port and client is connecting to that port.
As far as i understand port for client is dynamically assigned by node? Is that correct?
What kind of algorithm node is using to assign "random" port for the client? How this works, is this determined by node or by OS?
Is it possible to define static port which client is going to use? Is it possible to define range of ports for the client to use?
NOTE: I think i found discussion/question with similar subject on stackoverflow before, but i cannot find it anymore. I would apprecaite if you can share any reliable resources regarding this subject.
The source port number is usually pretty much irrelevant to your programming unless you have a router or firewall that is somehow restrictive in that regard. It is merely used by the underlying TCP infrastructure to keep track of different TCP connections.
From this article:
A TCP/IP connection is identified by a four element tuple: {source IP,
source port, destination IP, destination port}. To establish a TCP/IP
connection only a destination IP and port number are needed, the
operating system automatically selects source IP and port.
The above referenced article describes how Linux selects the source port number.
As to your particular questions:
What kind of algorithm node is using to assign "random" port for the
client? How this works, is this determined by node or by OS?
It is determined by the OS. That source port number is selected by the originating host at the TCP level before the connection is even made to node.js.
Some other reference articles:
Does the TCP source port have to be unique per host?
how can an application use port 80/HTTP without conflicting with browsers?
Note: there is no security reason I'm aware of for a firewall to limit the source port number or block certain source port numbers. They are a TCP bookkeeping number only, not related at all to security or the type of service being used. Note, this is different than the destination port which is usually correlated directly with the type of service being used (e.g. 80 is HTTP, 25 is SMTP, 143 is IMAP, etc... When you make a TCP connection to a different host, you specify the host address and the destination port number. You don't specify the source port number.
The selected answer is provides a lot of info, but does not deal with the underlying problem. Node does not appear to allow https.request to specify a port for the client. There exist localAddress and localPort options, but they appear to be broken.
I've opened a new question on this issue. Hopefully someone will answer with something other than "just don't do that."
Is there a way to set the source port for a node js https request?
I have an app running as a daemon on a linux box (Red Hat). The purpose of the app is to act as a registrar of sorts -- another device can connect to this host machine, and register (this is me, I am here -- this kind of thing). There is more than one IP address for this machine.
How do I connect/send/forward incoming connections (i.e., the registration data) to my daemon? That is, when the device wants to register and connects to my IP address, how do I direct the traffic to my process/daemon?
Thank you very much for all your help!
:bp:
Hi you may need to give a little more info.
What it sounds like you want to do is listen on a tcp port with your daemon. There are different ways to do this in different languages.
Another thing to watch out for are the reserved port ranges. Some ports can only be used by users with elevated privileges. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers TCP and UDP port ranges, They dynamic range is free to use as long as there is nothing else on that port.
What language are you using? In Perl This, is how you listen. And I could list off other tutorials for other languages, but there is not much point.
In reponse to the comment, I think this stackoverflow question answers the question.
some guys use a firewall on their laptops which not only blocks their own local incoming ports (except those they need for their application) but also blocks messages unless they are issued from a distinct port number. We're talking about a local UDP server which is listening to UDP broadcasts.
The problem is that the remote client uses a random port, say 1024, which is blocked unless they tell the firewall to accept it.
What puzzles me is that as far as I know from using sockets in my programs is that usually the client gets its port number from the OS, whereas only when you have a server, you bind your socket to a distinct port, right?
In my literature and in tutorials and code snippets in the web I haven't found any clue that clients should be using fixed port numbers at all.
So how is this in reality? Am I probably missing a point?
Are there client applications around using fixed ports?
Is is actually useful to block remote ports with a firewall?
And if yes, what level of added security does this give to you?
Thanks for enlightenment in beforehand...
Although the default API's allow the network stack to select a local port for client connections, clients may specify a fixed port for various reasons.
Some specifications (FTP) specify a fixed port for clients. Most servers don't care if clients get this correct.
Some clients use a fixed pool of ports for egress from a LAN to the Internet. This allows firewall rules to more completely lock down outbound traffic.
Source ports are sometimes uses as a weak type of "security through obscurity".
You always get a random address and/or port when not explicitly having bound to one before sending.
Daemons are usually bound to a fixed port, so that:
you can actually contact them without having to try all possible ports or utilize a secondary resolver (remember the SUNRPC portmapping crap?)
and because a TCP socket is not allowed to listen() if it has not bound to a port, IIRC.
Are there client applications around using fixed ports?
Some can be configured so, like BIND9.
useful to block remote ports with a firewall?
No, because your peer may choose any port of his. Block him and you'll lose a customer, so to speak.