New subject: does sender need to bind a socket to the multicast addr and receiver (portbase) port ?

9 Feb 2010


      Hi,
We're experiencing a strange behaviour with multicast igmp using  
udpcast.
- sender (quite old 20081213) is running on a Linux SLES 11 64 bit on  
a VMware ESX guest
- receivers (same version) are running on WinPE 2.0 x86 computers.
- sender and receivers are on the same vlan
This use to work amazingly well until for some reasons (correcting a  
bug actually), there was a firmware update on a 10GB Dell switch where  
the blade server is running all the VMware VMs.
Now it doesn't work anymore:
- the CMD_HELLO  part woks as espected, and receivers are given their  
ID and the multicast data adress to join in.
- then when the receiver actually sends CMD_GO, receivers don't even  
see the transfer has yet begun and sender finally quit after the  
normal timeout with no answer from participants.
It seems clients never receive data sent to the multicast data address.
So we made some tests using iperf as a multicast packet generator and  
rtpqual as a receiver; we could see that rtpqual was able to receive  
the packets only if we were also running an rtpqual on the machine we  
were generating the packet with iperf !
Then we made the same test with udp-sender and udp-receiver (2  
receivers) and guess what ? it started to work as soon as we started  
an rtpqual process on the sender side !
we could observe that when rtpqual is not running on the sender  
machine igmp cuts the tree on the Dell switch and receivers aren't  
getting the stream anymore.
It seems udp-sender should also bind to the multicast data address and  
portbase.
Seen on udpcast source code (socklib.c):
/**
  * Set socket to listen on given multicast address Not 100% clean, it
  * would be preferable to make a new socket, and not only subscribe it
  * to the multicast address but also _bind_ to it. Indeed, subscribing
  * alone is not enough, as we may get traffic destined to multicast
  * address subscribed to by other apps on the machine. However, for
  * the moment, we skip this concern, as udpcast's main usage is
  * software installation, and in that case it runs on an otherwise
  * quiet system.
  */
static int mcastListen(int sock, net_if_t *net_if, struct sockaddr_in  
*addr) {
     return mcastOp(sock, net_if, getSinAddr(addr), IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP,
    	   "Subscribe to multicast group");
}
However mcastListen is called from makeSocket() (socklib.c) which  
actually binds the socket.
Latest version of udpcast (20100130) doesn't seem to bring any change  
and behaves the same.
So, I tried to create an additional socket in startSender()  
(udps_negociate.c) and bind to RECEIVER_PORT(portBase):
mysock = makeSocket(ADDR_TYPE_MCAST,
    net_config->net_if,
    net_config->dataMcastAddr,
    RECEIVER_PORT(net_config->portBase));
But I got the same behaviour :(
So I pasted the whole openMC() function from rtpqual.c to socklib.c:
#define NOERROR(val,msg) {if (((int)(val)) < 0) {perror(msg);exit(1);}}
int openMC(name, port)
char *name;
int port;
{
   struct sockaddr_in sin;
   struct ip_mreq mreq;
   struct hostent *hp;
   int fd, one=1;
bzero(&sin, sizeof(struct sockaddr_in));
   if (isdigit(*name)) {
     sin.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(name);
   }
   else if (hp = gethostbyname(name)) {
     bcopy(hp->h_addr, (char *)&sin.sin_addr, hp->h_length);
   }
   else {
     printf("I Don't understand session name %s\n",name);
     exit(1);
   }
   sin.sin_family = AF_INET;
   sin.sin_port = port;
if (!IN_MULTICAST(ntohl(sin.sin_addr.s_addr))) {
     printf("%s is not a multicast session\n", name);
     exit(1);
   }
   mreq.imr_multiaddr = sin.sin_addr;
   mreq.imr_interface.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;
NOERROR(fd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0), "socket");
   NOERROR(setsockopt(fd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, &one, sizeof(one)),
      "SO_REUSEADDR");
if (bind(fd, (const struct sockaddr *) &sin, sizeof(sin)) == -1) {
     perror("Using INADDR_ANY because");
     sin.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY;
     NOERROR(bind(fd, (const struct sockaddr *) &sin, sizeof(sin)),  
"bind");
   }
NOERROR(setsockopt(fd, IPPROTO_IP, IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP, &mreq,  
sizeof(mreq)),
      "IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP");
return(fd);
}
And called it from the main() function from udp-sender.c
myMcastDataAddr is a string copy from the command line argument  
because net_config structure only stores the sock_addr_in values and  
so that I can directly use the openMC() function without any  
modification.
/* -- */
printf("addr = %s\n", myMcastDataAddr);
printf("port = %d\n", RECEIVER_PORT(net_config.portBase));
printf("openMC()\n");
mysock = openMC(myMcastDataAddr, RECEIVER_PORT(net_config.portBase));
/* -- */
Indeed, it works now, despite this is a really ugly hack!
However openMC() seems to do the same as makeSocket do: create the  
socket, bind to the specified multicast address and port and call a  
setsockopt for IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP.
So now it works for me, but it would be great if the correct patch  
(not mine) was integrated to the source code (maybe others would need  
it).
EDIT: it works with makeSocket only if I call htons() to the port  
number:
mysock = makeSocket(ADDR_TYPE_MCAST,
    		net_config->net_if,
    		&net_config->dataMcastAddr,
    		htons(RECEIVER_PORT(net_config->portBase)));
Other calls to makeSocket() doesn't use htons to swap the bytes so I  
initially I wasn't doing either ...
thanks
Alban
--
Alban Rodriguez
Centre de Ressources Informatiques
Université de La Rochelle
http://cri.univ-lr.fr