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<== Date ==> <== Thread ==>

Subject: RE: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort
From: Mark Rivers <[email protected]>
To: "'J. Lewis Muir'" <[email protected]>, Torsten Bögershausen <[email protected]>, "'Patel Jignesh'" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Cc: "'Eric Norum'" <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 18:11:11 +0000
Hi Lewis,

> I wouldn't think just reading would work.  If it's just blocking
> indefinitely in a read, and the hardware it's communicating with is then
> powered off, for example, I don't think the blocking read will detect
> that.

I'm not sure I understand this.  asyn does reads either using poll with a timeout or setting a socket timeout.  If the device is powered off then the recv() will initially timeout return an error like "Device is temporarily unavailable", but if the read is done repeatedly then after some system-dependent period of time the OS will disconnect the socket, and asyn will mark the port as disconnected.

The problem as I understand it is that some ports on his PLC are "write only", so he is not allowed to do a read.  We wants to do a write that has no side-effects except seeing if the device is connected.

The best way to do this probably to assume that if one of the read ports is disconnected, then the device is not available, and not try to do it for the write-only ports at all.

Of course, Jignesh you could try modifying drvAsynIPPort.c to allow a 0-length read and see what you observe.

Mark


-----Original Message-----
From: J. Lewis Muir [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2014 12:55 PM
To: Torsten Bögershausen; Mark Rivers; 'Patel Jignesh'; [email protected]
Cc: 'Eric Norum'
Subject: Re: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort

On 10/8/14 11:03 PM, Torsten Bögershausen wrote:
>> I don't know what the rules are about sending a 0-length message with
>> send().  Is it allowed, and is the behavior well-defined for all
>> platforms?
>
> To  my knowlegde the answer is no.
> Neither this page
>
> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/send.html
>
> nor the man page of Debian Linux nor the man page My Mac OS X box
> mention send(0 bytes) as a valid function call.
>
> My conclusion is that send() with zero bytes length is unportable.

Hi, Torsten.

Well, they don't actually say that a zero length send is invalid, do
they?  It seems they just don't mention that case, so it's hard to say.

However, some recv function documentation [1][2][3] says that when a
stream socket peer performs an orderly shutdown, recv returns 0.  In
this case, there would be no way to distinguish a TCP packet with a zero
length data payload from an orderly peer shutdown.  So, maybe it's not
really a good idea for TCP.

[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/recv.html
[2] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/recvmsg.2.html
[3] http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?recv

>>> Now I want to monitor this channel connection status in case of
>>> disconnection or failure from PLC side.
>
> You could define a "dummy command" which does nothing in the PLC,
> (Other people may call it "no operation command" or NOP) and send that
> every minute or so to the PLC.
>
> Having some activity on the connection ASYN.isConnected() should work
> as expected.
>
> Or simply stick to the dummy read, if that does the job for you.

Right, some simple no-op command with an acknowledgment (e.g. query
firmware version) could be used.

I wouldn't think just reading would work.  If it's just blocking
indefinitely in a read, and the hardware it's communicating with is then
powered off, for example, I don't think the blocking read will detect
that.

Another possibility (albeit requiring software development) might be
for Asyn to support a keep-alive option for TCP connections.  This
would get passed down as an SO_KEEPALIVE option on the socket.  It
would also need options for setting the idle time, the keep-alive probe
retransmit interval, and the keep-alive probe retransmit count.  These
would correspond to TCP socket options like TCP_KEEPIDLE, TCP_KEEPINTVL,
and TCP_KEEPCNT.  (I don't know whether these are standardized.)  Then
I think a blocking read would return with an error if the keep-alive
mechanism determined the connection was broken.

Lewis


Replies:
Re: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Eric Norum
RE: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Patel Jignesh
References:
TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Patel Jignesh
RE: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Mark Rivers
RE: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Patel Jignesh
RE: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Mark Rivers
Re: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort Torsten Bögershausen
Re: TCP connection status : drvAsynIPPort J. Lewis Muir

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