Daemons

In the Pipes section I showed some simple examples of how servers can be built using the pipe_open function. Such an approach is fine if you only want to use one protocol or address type. But real-world servers may need to run on multiple routes, address, and interfaces. The Daemon class offers a way to build such servers.

To use it you sub class it and define your own msg_cb function.

listen_all

from p2pd import *

class EchoServer(Daemon):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
    #
    async def msg_cb(self, msg, client_tup, pipe):
        await pipe.send(msg, client_tup)

async def main():
    i = await Interface().start()
    #
    # Daemon instance.
    server_port = 10126
    echod = await EchoServer().listen_all(
        [i],
        [server_port],
        [TCP]
    )
    #
    await echod.close()

await main()

The listen_all method of the Daemon class is as follows.

async def listen_all(self, targets, ports, protos, af=AF_ANY, msg_cb=None,  error_on_af=0)

Targets, ports, and protos are a list. The supported objects that can be used as targets are Interfaces and Routes. A range may be given as an entry in the ports list by using [start, stop] (inclusive.) The total number of servers created will be len(targets) * total_ports * len(protos) * total_afs. For example:

targets = [i, r]
ports = [10000, [30000, 30100]]
protos = [TCP]
af = AF_ANY (use all supported address families of the related interface.)

Let’s assume that i and r use duel-stack interface. The total servers would be 2 * 101 * 1 * 2 = 404 so it can add up fast if you’re not careful. It should be noted that any Route objects passed as targets will have their bound information ignored if they’re already bound. But their NIC IPs and EXT IPs will still be used as a template to create routes for the servers based on the other parameters used for listen_all.

Note

IPv6 note: P2PD has small differences in the way it handles IPv6 services compared to IPv4 which would be unexpected without learning about them. In IPv4 to run a server on a network interface that can be reached from the LAN and WAN you simply listen on one of the NICs IPs. In IPv6 it has kind of split up LAN IPs and external IPs into link-local addresses and global-scope addresses, respectively.

I wanted the code to work the same with IPv6 so I start with the assumption that users want servers to be reachable internally and externally. Hence I don’t just bind to a global-scope address. I also bind to a link-local address. That means that for IPv6 the final number of servers created is multipled by 2. Maybe this is a bad idea but I think it simplifies a lot of things.

listen_specific

The listen_all function is useful for applying the same AFs, protocols, and ports to the entries in the targets list. But sometimes you want to use the targets as-is if they’re already ‘bound.’ Perhaps in the case where they’ve been specifically set to bind to a loopback adapter or even ‘all addresses.’

async def listen_specific(self, targets, msg_cb=None)

The format of targets here is given as [[target, protocol], …].

p = 10233
d = Daemon()
i = await Interface().start()
b = await i.route(i.supported()[0]).bind(ips="127.0.0.1")
await d.listen_specific(
    targets=[[b, TCP]],
)

await d.close()

The listen_specific code hasn’t been tested too much so it’s better to use listen_all.