Hello Thomas!

Replying to a message of Thomas Seeling to Brett Maxfield:

 BM>> I was wondering if anybody is familiar with building tcp/ip servers
 BM>> with warp, specifically using the emx/bsd programming interface.
 TS> That's correct, you call bind(), listen() and accept() in a server,
 TS> and depending on the settings for listen, either you accept a
 TS> connection from a certain ip address or from any address. You can
 TS> find out the hostname, but you should be aware that gethostbyaddr is
 TS> not threadsafe from my experience (tcp/ip 2.0 and un64092). Therefore
 TS> a mutex semaphore should be used to encapsulate the call.

 I am not yet fully familiar with threads.. but 'not theadsafe' would
 mean non-reeentrant among threads of a single task? This would be ok as
 each thread would have be given a socket fd, and a hostname or maybe
 a struct with any miscelleneous connection info by it's controlling
 task.

 BM>>     7. spawn or fork a process to handle that connection
 TS> You should fire up a thread instead. Avoid fork() whereever possible.
 TS> This is a kludge with OS/2 and very inefficient. Use it only when
 TS> porting Unix pieces to get it run quickly, then think about how to
 TS> replace the fork() by threads.

 Most likely i will have a server process, with each connection having
 a thread which is given the socket fd for that connection. The thread
 could then exit asynchronously when the connection died. It would then
 be responsible for freeing the passed socket and ending it's thread,
 when the connection was complete.

 TS> These are cuts from my www server. You have to fill in some gaps
 TS> (proxy, caching, security :-) ), but it definitely works (then).

 TS>  tid=_beginthread(handlereq,NULL,STACK,NULL);

 I will most likely need to read up on begin/end thread.. but your code
 looks like it will solve most of my problems :)

 The only other thing is, how does the thread then control the status of
 the connection, ie. detect when the connection has been lost, or if it
 decides that the connection has to be closed.

 If the main task recieved a terminating signal, it would need to be able
 to close all it's threads which would (hopefully) be able to remove any
 resources that they were using when they got the signal.

 I have recently found the online docs in an old devcon (volume 7) which
 documents the socket calls in quite a bit of detail. The only problem
 is that the examples are single-threaded.

 I really appreciate your assistance..

 Cheers
 Brett

--- FleetStreet 1.14 NR