Working With Sockets

[l008com]

I'm having issues working with sockets in PHP, I'm hoping someone can help.

 

I'm making an application in which I need to open my own socket connections. There are two specific features that I need:

I need to set a timeout for the connection attempt.

I need these connections to come from a custom IP address, and by that I mean that my server has more than one IP, and I need the socket connection to use an IP that is not the server's default internet connection port.

 

There are (as far as I know) two ways to open a socket connection. Both techniques meet a requirement and miss a requirement.

 

Option 1: I can use the function fsockopen( ) to open the connection. This function works great and let's me set a timeout for the connection itself. It's solid and reliable. However it has, as far as I can tell, no way to set the connection to come from a custom IP. All connections using this function come from the server's default IP address.

 

Option 2: The socket_create( ) / socket_connect( ) family of functions. These functions have a lot more options, they let you do a lot more. I can easily bind the socket to my server's secondary IP address so socket connections will come from it. HOWEVER as far as I can tell, these family of functions lack a connection timeout. You can set timeout for reads and timeouts for writes. But there doesn't seem to be a way to set a timeout for initiating the connection itself. Even setting the "default_socket_timeout" parameter doesn't have any effect on the connection time. 

 

This type of question is a bit more technical than most PHP questions. But I'm hoping someone out there knows a way I can open sockets while meeting both of my two requirements. It's entirely possible that it is not possible, I know. But hopefully it can be done.

 

One thought I had was a way of using the second option, and wrapping the whole socket_connect( ) function inside of another function that sets a timeout, and would kill the socket_connect( ) function once the timeout was met. However, I don't know of any such system in PHP, this was only a concept theory. 

 

 

How I open my sockets using fsockopen( ):

$sock = @fsockopen($ip,$port,$errno,$errstr,$timeout);

 

How I open my sockets using socket_create( ):

ini_set("default_socket_timeout",$timeout);
$sock = socket_create(AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,SOL_TCP);
socket_bind($sock,OPERATING_IP);
socket_set_option($sock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVTIMEO, array("sec" => $timeout, "usec" => 0));
socket_set_option($sock, SOL_SOCKET, SO_SNDTIMEO, array("sec" => $timeout, "usec" => 0));
$sock_status = @socket_connect($sock,$ip,$port);

[kicken]

There are (as far as I know) two ways to open a socket connection. Both techniques meet a requirement and miss a requirement.

Option 3) stream_socket_client

 

The bind address can be set using the context parameter. Create a context and set it's bindto option to the IP you want.

 

$timeout = '5';
$params = array('socket' => array('bindto' => 'x.x.x.x'));
$context = stream_context_create($params);
$socket = stream_socket_client('tcp://remote.host:port', $errno, $errstr, $timeout, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT, $context);

[l008com]

So I got around to playing with this tonight. This new way of opening sockets does work. And the timeout does seem to work properly (although I do need to do some more thorough testing, but so far so good. 

 

HOWEVER it does not appear to be binding to the IP provided.

 

This is what I have going on:

 

$params = array('socket' => array('bindto' => OPERATING_IP));
$context = stream_context_create($params);
$socket = @stream_socket_client("tcp://$ip:$port", $errno, $errstr, $timeout, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT, $context);

[l008com]

Wow this forum loves to eat half my post spontaneously. The REST of the post above said that OPERATING_IP is a user defined constant but it still doesn't work even if I hard code the IP address in there as a string.

 

And yes I verified the IP is correct.

 

And I also verified again that the socket_create( ) / socket_bind( ) code from above, DOES bind to the proper IP. This is the code that works but has no connection timeout. 

 

So any thoughts on why binding with stream_socket isn't working?

[l008com]

So turns out the bindto IP needs to be in the format of x.x.x.x:0, so I changed my code a bit and now it's working properly:

 

$options = array("socket" => array("bindto" => OPERATING_IP.":0" ));