CS110 Lecture 20: Introduction to Networking

CS110: Principles of Computer Systems

Winter 2021-2022

Stanford University

Instructors: Nick Troccoli and Jerry Cain

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CS110 Topic 4: How can we write programs that communicate over a network with other programs?

Learning About Networking

Introduction to  Networking

Servers / HTTP

Clients, Servers and APIs

Networking System Calls

Today

Lecture 21

Lecture 22

Lecture 23

assign6: implement an HTTP Proxy that sits between a client device and a web server to monitor, block or modify web traffic.

Learning Goals

  • Understand how networking enables two programs on separate machines to communicate 
  • Learn about the client-server model and how client and server programs interact
  • Understand how to write our first client program

Plan For Today

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

Plan For Today

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

Networking Overview

  • We have learned how to write programs that can communicate with other programs via mechanisms like signals and pipes.
  • However, the communicating programs must both be running on the same machine.
  • Networking allows us to write code to send and receive data to/from a program running on another machine.
  • Many new questions, such as:
    • how does the data get there?
    • what functions do we use to send/receive data?

Networking Patterns

  • Most networked programs rely on a pattern called the "client-server model"
  • This refers to two program "roles": clients and servers
  • clients send requests to servers, who respond to those requests
    • e.g. YouTube app (client) sends requests to the YouTube servers for what content  to display
    • e.g. Web browser (client) sends requests to the server at a URL for what content to display
  • A server continually listens for incoming requests and sends responses back ("running a phone call center")
  • A client sends a request to a server and does something with the response ("making a call")
  • We will learn how to write both client and server programs.
    • on assign6, your proxy will act as both a client and a server!

Sending/Receiving Data

  • We can send any arbitrary bytes over the network
  • The client and server usually agree on a data format to use for requests and responses
  • Many data protocols like HTTP (internet), IMAP (email), others

But how does data actually get from one machine to another?

Plan For Today

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

IP Addresses

  • To send data to another program, we need to know the IP Address ("Internet Protocol Address") of its machine
  • Every computer on a network has a unique IP Address - e.g. 171.67.215.200
  • A traditional IPv4 ("version 4") address is 4 bytes long: 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by periods
  • Problem: there aren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around anymore!  Exhausted in the 2010s
  • Now there is a new version, IPv6, supporting more values with 16-byte addresses
  • An IPv6 address is 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits - e.g. 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334

DNS Lookup

  • Problem: it's hard for us to remember IP addresses for different machines!
  • Solution: assign human-readable names (e.g. "google.com") to different machines, and translate those names to IP addresses.
  • The Domain Name System (DNS) is what translates names to IP addresses
    • A collection of decentralized and hierarchical servers that we can contact to perform translation
    • decentralized: many DNS servers handling lookup all over
    • hierarchical: translation performed in steps: e.g for looking up web.stanford.edu:
      • query an .edu root server for IP address of a stanford.edu name server
      • query stanford.edu name server for IP address of web.stanford.edu
  • Form of ​name resolution, like inode numbers and filename lookup in filesystems!

Digging For Treasure

  • Your computer performs DNS lookups frequently on your behalf - e.g. when you want to visit a website in your browser.

  • For fun, we can view DNS servers using the dig command:

    • where are the edu nameservers?  "dig -t NS +noall +answer edu"

    • the stanford.edu nameservers? "dig -t NS +noall +answer stanford.edu"

    • where is web.stanford.edu? "dig -t A +noall +answer web.stanford.edu"

IP Addresses and Ports

  • IP addresses let us identify the machine we want to communicate with
  • DNS lets us look up the IP address for a given name
  • Another problem: what if we want to run multiple networked programs per machine?
    • Limiting if we can only e.g. ssh or have a web server on one machine
  • Solution: every networked program running is assigned a unique port number
    • mail analogy: IP address = Stanford dorm, port number = dorm room number
  • When you wish to connect to a program on another machine, you must specify both the IP Address of the machine and the port number assigned to that program
  • port numbers are like "virtual process IDs"
  • You can see some of the ports a computer is listening to with "netstat -plnt"
  • How do we remember port numbers?  What if they can change each time we run?

IP Addresses and Ports

  • Key Idea: establish standard port numbers for some common types of programs
  • Your web browser takes an entered URL, uses DNS to look up the IP address, and sends a request to that IP address, port 80 for the webpage you requested.
  • A server program will run on a machine and be assigned a port number
  • A client program wishing to connect to that server must send a request to that port number at that IP address.

So how can we write code that communicates with another program?

Plan For Today

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

Sockets and Descriptors

  • Linux uses the same descriptor abstraction for network connections as it does for files!
  • You can open a connection to a program on another machine and you'll get back a socket descriptor number referring to your descriptor table
  • A socket is the endpoint of a single connection over a port.  It is represented as a descriptor we can read from/write to.
  • You can read to / write from that descriptor to communicate
  • You close the descriptor when you're done
  • Like a pipe, but with only one descriptor, not two: network communication is bidirectional, but usually the client and server speak one a time, not simultaneously.
  • "socket descriptor" is to "port number" as "file descriptor" is to "filename"

Key Idea: networking is remote function call and return.

Plan For Today

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

Our First Client Program

  • Let's write our first program that sends a request to a server!
  • Example: I am running a server on myth64.stanford.edu, port 12345 that can tell you the current time
  • Whenever a client connects to it, the server sends back the time as text.  The client doesn't need to send any data.
// Opens a connection to a server (returns kClientSocketError on error)
int createClientSocket(const string& host, unsigned short port);

New helper function to connect to a server:

(Later on, we will learn how to implement createClientSocket!)

Our First Client Program

I am running a server on myth64.stanford.edu, port 12345 that can tell you the current time.  Whenever a client connects to it, the server sends back the time as text.  

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  // Open a connection to the server
  int socketDescriptor = createClientSocket("myth64.stanford.edu", 12345);

  // Read in the data from the server (assumed to be at most 1024 byte string)
  char buf[1024];
  size_t bytes_read = 0;
  while (true) {
    size_t read_this_time = read(socketDescriptor, buf + bytes_read, sizeof(buf) - bytes_read);
    if (read_this_time == 0) break;
    bytes_read += read_this_time;
  }
  buf[bytes_read] = '\0';
  close(socketDescriptor);

  // print the data from the server
  cout << buf << flush;
  return 0;
}
time-client-descriptor.cc

Client Sockets

Client sockets work similarly to regular file descriptors - we open one, read from/write to it, and close it.

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  // Open a connection to the server
  int socketDescriptor = createClientSocket("myth64.stanford.edu", 12345);

  // Read in the data from the server (assumed to be at most 1024 byte string)
  char buf[1024];
  size_t bytes_read = 0;
  while (true) {
    size_t read_this_time = read(socketDescriptor, buf + bytes_read, sizeof(buf) - bytes_read);
    if (read_this_time == 0) break;
    bytes_read += read_this_time;
  }
  buf[bytes_read] = '\0';
  close(socketDescriptor);

  // print the data from the server
  cout << buf << flush;
  return 0;
}
time-client-descriptor.cc

Using Socket Descriptors

Using read/write is cumbersome with socket descriptors.  The socket++ library provides a type iosockstream that let us wrap a socket descriptor in a stream (so that we can read/write like we do with cout):

static string readLineFromSocket(int socketDescriptor) {
  sockbuf socketBuffer(socketDescriptor);
  iosockstream socketStream(&socketBuffer);
  string timeline;
  getline(socketStream, timeline);
  return timeline;
} // sockbuf destructor closes client

Our First Client Program

Here is a version of the same client program using sockbuf and iosockstream instead of read:

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  // Open a connection to the server
  int socketDescriptor = createClientSocket("myth64.stanford.edu", 12345);

  // Read in the data from the server (sockbuf descructor closes descriptor)
  sockbuf socketBuffer(socketDescriptor);
  iosockstream socketStream(&socketBuffer);
  string timeline;
  getline(socketStream, timeline);

  // Print the data from the server
  cout << timeline << endl;

  return 0;
}
time-client.cc

Recap

  • Networking Overview
  • IP Addresses, DNS Lookup and Ports
  • Sockets and Descriptors
  • Our first client program

 

 

Next time: more about servers, data formats and protocols

CS110 Lecture 20: Introduction to Networking

By Nick Troccoli

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CS110 Lecture 20: Introduction to Networking

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