proper way to handle missing IPv6 connectivity - networking

I'm currently looking for a way to properly handle missing IPv6 connectivity.
The use case is, that i resolve a DNS record which might contain AAAA records and connect to each of the resolved IPs. Now the system running that code might not have IPv6 connectivity.
So i'm looking for the proper way to handle this and ignore these records, but only if the host can't connect anyway.
My current approach is:
if ip.To4() == nil && err.(*net.OpError).Err.(*os.SyscallError).Err == syscall.EHOSTUNREACH {
log.Info("ignoring unreachable IPv6 address")
continue
}
But i'm not sure, if there is a better way.

A simple solution would be to use a net.Dialer with DualStack set to true and just Dial() using a name and let the library handle the "happy eyeballs" for you.

Related

UDP connections in Julia

using Sockets
sock = UDPSocket()
bind(sock,ip"x.x.x.x",port)
I am new to Sockets.jl and when I run this code in the REPL, the bind() function returns "false". Does anyone know what this means? I'm sure I have the right IP and port#. There isn't much documentation for the Sockets.jl package.
Checking the Sockets.jl code, bind returns false only if one of these three errors occurs:
UV_EACCES
= permission denied
UV_EADDRINUSE
= address already in use
UV_EADDRNOTAVAIL
= address not available
Do you have a firewall that might be blocking UDP access? If you're sure about the IP address being correct, then UV_EACCES seems like the most likely reason for failure here.

Is it possible to restrict ForceBindIP to only inbound/outbound traffic?

I'm using ForcebindIP to point an app at a specific network adapter, like this:
forcebindip -i 192.168.0.5 MyCSharpApp.exe
This works fine and the app isn't aware (or doesn't access) any of the other network adapters on the PC.
Is it possible to restrict ForceBindIP to outbound traffic only leaving the app to receive data from any local network adapter? Or even to specify a network adapter for outbound and another for inbound traffic?
I can't find an extra startup parameter for ForceBindIP that does this.
I'd appreciate any help with this.
If I get your problem correctly, you want to bind your application to listen for packets on all available interfaces but return packets to only through one given interface. I also assume it's a server application and you don't have neiter source code nor control over its behaviour.
Disclosure: I do not know how ForceBindIP works internally, I'm basing my understanding of it on this passage from the website:
it will then inject a DLL (BindIP.dll) which loads WS2_32.DLL into memory and intercepts the bind(), connect(), sendto(), WSAConnect() and WSASendTo() functions, redirecting them to code in the DLL which verifies which interface they will be bound to and if not the one specified, (re)binds the socket
Problems to overcome
I don't believe your desired configuration is possible with just one application level DLL injector. I'll list a few issues that ForceBindIP will have to overcome to make it work:
to listen to a socket, application has to bind() it to a unique protocol-address-port combination first. An application can bind itself to either a specific address or a wildcard (i.e. listen on all interfaces). Apparently, one can bind to wildcard and specific address simultaneously as outlined in this SO question. This however will be two different sockets from the application standpoint. Therefore your application will have to know how to handle this sort of traffic.
When accepting client connection, accept() will create a new socket and parameters on that are managed by Windows, I don't believe there's an API to intercept binding here - by this time the connection is considered established.
Now imagine, we somehow got a magic socket. We can receive packets on one interface and send to another. The client (and all routing equipment on the way) will have to be aware that two packets originating from two different source IP addresses are actually part of the same connection and be able to assemble the TCP session (or correctly merge UDP streams).
You can have multiple gefault gateways with different priorities and rules (which is a whole different topic to explore) but as far as I'm aware that's not going to solve your particular issue: majority of routing protocols assume links are symmetric and expect packets to keep within same interface. There are special cases like asymmetric routing and network interface teaming but they have to be implemented on per-interface level.
One potential solution
One way to achieve what you're after (I don't know enough about your environment to claim it will work), will be to create a virtual interface, set it into yet another IP network, bind your application to it, then use firewall (to, say, allow multicast backets into the "virtual" network) and routing from that network to required default gateway with metric set to 1. I also suspect just any Windows will not be that flexible, so you might need like a Server Edition.
I am sorry this didn't turn out to be the ready-to-fly solution, I however am hoping this gives you more context to the problem you are facing and points you into other directions to explore.
You can use Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty command in Powershell to set the flow control of your specified adapter
To get the names and properties of all the network adapter :-
Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name "*"
Suppose you want the network adapter named "Ethernet 2" to be only used to receive data from internet then type :-
Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty -Name "Ethernet 2" -DisplayName "Flow Control" -DisplayValue "Rx Enabled"
You can find more in :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/netadapter/set-netadapteradvancedproperty?view=win10-ps
Microsoft winsock example has a usage in their example for limiting a socket to only send or receive mode. It might help.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/complete-client-code
Outbount and Inbount limits are not imposed while binding. But latter or when connection is established.
Line of code pertaining to this in client code is toward the end.
// shutdown the connection since no more data will be sent
iResult = shutdown(ConnectSocket, SD_SEND);

What is the difference between a 'shallow' and 'deep' ping?

So as a fairly new (out-in-the-world-working) developer I'm not unfamiliar to the concept of pinging as it was taught to me in uni and I've used it in various small assignments I've encountered before.
My understanding of it is determining whether another host is present and responsive on a network.
I've implemented in Java (the language i'm most comfortable in) some code similar to the one below when wanting to achieve pinging:
try {
String ip = "127.192.199.01";
InetAddress inet = InetAddress.getByName(ip);
System.out.println("Send ping-request to: " + ip);
if (inet.isReachable(5000)){
System.out.println(ip + " is reachable.");
} else {
System.out.println(ip + " NOT reachable.");
}
} catch ( Exception e ) {
System.out.println("Exception:" + e.getMessage());
}
However I pretty new to the concept of 'shallow' and 'deep' pinging which is something I've encountered at my current workplace.
So far though I've been able to figure out that deep pinging is basically about testing that all connections are alive and working while testing functionality through as much of a webstack as possible.
Got that from: what is deep_ping
My question is:
What does a shallow ping do then?
And what is then the main difference (if any) between a shallow and deep ping?
Shallow ping works by sending one or more (ICMP/ICMP6) Echo Request packets to the host and only tests if the network is working i.e. if the host is reachable from your machine.
Deep pinging works by testing the application. How the deep ping is implemented is up to the developer but it could be via a "status" endpoint which responds with the current application status, or another similar interface (as described in the link you already mentioned).
As per your link, deep pinging can also mean testing an entire subnet or testing other protocols than the standard Echo Request.
This sounds like you are performing host availability test on different OSI layers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model)
A ping how you know it is performed on the transport layer, where a single packet is sent to the other machine and the OS responds with another packet.
In that case you do not know if there is ANY application running on that node other than the clean OS.
Going further up in the OSI layers you can then perform tests on you business logic like calling APIs of your HTTP based REST API
My gut feeling is that "shallow ping" means a ping performed using the standard ICMP request (the well known ping command we know about), a "deep ping" is trying to access the actual remote service by opening a socket on a given port and see if you get any answer
How I can interpret it:
Shallow ping : The host is available, port on which service is exposed is accepting. (more like telnet)
Deep ping : You are actually hitting one of the service and getting an expected response back.
Again, these are more like custom terms, not an actually defined standard.

Is it possible to build an arp request packet in such a way that will cause a router to forward it over subnets?

What I'm trying to do is get all the ip addresses in my network, and I thought, assuming I know the address of all subnets could use arp requests to achieve that if there was a way to forward these requests over different subnets.
For example , assume I had two hosts
192.168.0.2/24 and 192.168.1.2/24
connected via router using IP addresses 192.168.0.1/16 192.168.1.1/16.
I would like to send an arp request from 192.168.0.2/16 to 192.168.1.2/16.
I thought maybe if the arp request was encapsulated in layer 3 header containing 192.168.1.2/24, or 192.168.1.255/24 as the dsetination this will work.
If it is possible and you know a tool that does that I will be happy to know about this tool.
If it isn't, I would like to know what happens to a packet like the one I described above
I would like to know what happens to a packet like the one I described above
If you encapsulate some info into standard IP-packet, then, naturally, it will be routed to the IP-destination host. Yet if the remote host knew nothing about this non-standard packet, then nothing would happen.
If you really want to get something out of this, you need to have up and running some software server on that remote host, which is able to process your requests. That is, you need some Proxy ARP: either existing implementation, or made of your own.
If you don't have such "an agent" in the target subnetwork, then you're out of luck. Go with sequential IP-scanning until be banned by admin.

Determining when to try an IPv6 connection and when to use IPv4

I'm working on a network client program that connects to public servers, specified by the user. If the user gives me a hostname to connect to that has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (commonly, a DNS name with both A and AAAA records), I'm not sure how I should decide which address I should connect to.
The problem is that it's quite common for machines to support both IPv4 and IPv6, but only to have global connectivity over IPv4. The most common case of this is when only IPv6 link-local addresses are configured. At the moment the best alternatives I can come up with are:
Try the IPv6 address(es) first - if the connection fails, try the IPv4 address(es); or
Just let the user specify it as a config setting ("prefer_ipv6" versus "prefer_ipv4").
The problem I can see with option 1 is that the connection might not fail straight away - it might take quite a while to time out.
Please do try IPv6. In the significant majority of installations, trying to create an IPv6 connection will fail right away if it can't succeed for some reason:
if the system doesn't support IPv6 sockets, creating the socket will fail
if the system does support IPv6, and has link-local addresses configured, there won't be any routing table entry for the global IPv6 addresses. Again, the local kernel will report failure without sending any packets.
if the system does have a global IP address, but some link necessary for routing is missing, the source should be getting an ICMPv6 error message, indicating that the destination cannot be reached; likewise if the destination has an IPv6 address, but the service isn't listening on it.
There are of course cases where things can break, e.g. if a global (or tunnel) address is configured, and something falsely filters out ICMPv6 error messages. You shouldn't worry about this case - it may be just as well that IPv4 connectivity is somehow broken.
Of course, it's debatable whether you really need to try the IPv6 addresses first - you might just as well try them second. In general, you should try addresses in the order in which they are returned from getaddrinfo. Today, systems support configuration options that let administators decide in what order addresses should be returned from getaddrinfo.
Subsequent to the question being asked the IETF has proposed an answer to this question with RFC6555, a.k.a. Happy Eyeballs.
The pertinent point being the client and server may both have IPv4 and IPv6 but a hop in between may not so it is impossible to reliably predict which path will work.
You should let the system-wide configuration decide thanks to getaddrinfo(). Just like Java does. Asking every single application to try to cater for every single possible IPv6 (mis)configuration is really not scalable! In case of a misconfiguration it is much more intuitive to the user if all or none applications break.
On the other hand you want to try to log annoying delays and time-outs profusely, so users can quickly identify what to blame. Just like every other delays ideally, including (very common) DNS time-outs.
This talk has the solution. To summarize;
Sometimes there are problems with either DNS lookups or the subsequent connection to the resolved address
You don't want to wait for connecting to an IPv6 address to timeout before connecting to the IPv4 address, or vice versa
You don't want to wait for a lookup for an AAAA record to timeout before looking for an A record or vice versa
You don't want to stall while waiting for both AAAA and A records before attempting to connect with whichever record you get back first.
The solution is to lookup AAAA and A records simultaneously and independently, and to connect independently to the resolved addresses. Use whatever connection succeeds first.
The easiest way to do this is to allow the networking API do it for you using connect-by-name networking APIs. For example, in Java:
InetSocketAddress socketAddress = new InetSocketAddress("www.example.com", 80);
SocketChannel channel = SocketChannel.open(socketAddress);
channel.write(buffer);
The slide notes say at this point:
Here we make an opaque object called an InetSocketAddress from a host
and port, and then when we open that SocketChannel, that can complete
under the covers, doing whatever is necessary, without the
application ever seeing an IP address.
Windows also has connect-by-name APIs. I don’t have code fragments for
those here.
Now, I’m not saying that all implementations of these APIs necessarily
do the right thing today, but if applications are using these APIs,
then the implementations can be improved over time.
The di!erence with getaddrinfo() and similar APIs is that they
fundamentally can’t be improved over time. The API definition is that
they return you a full list of addresses, so they have to wait until
they have that full list to give you. There’s no way getaddrinfo can
return you a partial list and then later give you some more.
Some ideas:
Allow the user to specify the preference on a per-site basis.
Try IPv4 first.
Attempt IPv6 in parallel upon the first connection.
On subsequent connections, use IPv6 if the connection was successful previously.
I say to try IPv4 first because that is the protocol which is better established and tested.

Resources