multi-server

Multi-Server

Submission

We will be using GitHub for distributing and collecting your assignments. At this point you should have been added to a GitHub repository for this homework. If you have not been added yet, please reach out to the TA’s via an Ed post. Note that if you submitted the group form late, you will not have a repo yet - please reach out to the TA’s via an Ed post in that case. You will have to wait until a little after the assignment has been released, but please feel free to work on it independently.

To obtain the skeleton files that we have provided for you, you need to clone your private repository to your VM. Your repository page should have a button titled “< > Code”. Click on it, and under the “Clone” section, select “SSH” and copy the link from there. For example:

$ git clone git@github.com:columbia-os-hw/hw3-team<id>.git

For each individual part, please create a new directory. For example, when you work on part 3, you should create a new directory named part3. In each directory, you should include a Makefile with a default target that builds an executable named multi-server, and compiles with the -Wall and -Werror compiler flags.

The TAs will use scripts to download, extract, build, and display your code. It is essential that you DO NOT change the names of the skeleton files provided to you. If you deviate from the requirements, the grading scripts will fail and you will not receive credit for your work.

You need to have at least 5 git commits total, but we encourage you to have many more. All your work should be committed to the main branch. If you have not used git before, this tutorial can get you started.

With group assignments, we recommend that you push work to branches first, and then merge back into main once your group members have reviewed the code. You can read more about them here.

To hand in your assignment, you will create and push a tag:

$ git tag -a -m "Completed hw3." hw3handin
$ git push origin main
$ git push origin hw3handin

You should verify that you are able to see your final commit and your hw3handin tag on your GitHub repository page for this assignment.

If you made a mistake and wish to resubmit your assignment, you may do the following to delete your submission tag:

$ git push --delete origin hw3handin
$ git tag --delete hw3handin

You may then repeat the submission process. You are encouraged to resubmit as often as necessary to perfect your submission. As always, your submission should not contain any binary files.

At a minimum, README.txt should contain the following info:

The description should indicate whether your solution for the part is working or not. You may also want to include anything else you would like to communicate to the grader, such as extra functionality you implemented or how you tried to fix your non-working code.

Answers to written questions, if applicable, must be added to the skeleton file we have provided.

Part 0: Basic single-process / single-threaded web server (Not graded)

Required tasks

Deliverables

Part 1: Multi-process web server

The basic version of multi-server has a limitation: it can handle only one connection at a time. This is a serious limitation because a malicious client could take advantage of this weakness and prevent the server from processing additional requests by sending an incomplete HTTP request. In this part we improve the situation by creating additional processes to handle requests.

The easiest way (from a programmer’s point of view) to handle multiple connections simultaneously is to create additional child processes with the fork() system call. Each time a new connection is accepted, instead of processing the request within the same process, we create a new child process by calling fork() and let it handle the request.

The child process inherits the open client socket and processes the request, generating a response. After the response has been sent, the child process terminates.

Required tasks

Requirements (and hints)

  1. Note that the two socket descriptors – the server socket and the new connected client socket – are duplicated when the server forks. Make sure to close anything you don’t need as early as possible. Think about these:

    • Does the parent process need the client socket? Should it close it? If so, when? If the parent closes it, should the child close it again?

    • Does the child process need the server socket? Should it close it? What would happen if it doesn’t close it?

  2. Don’t let your children become zombies… At least not for too long. Make sure the parent process calls waitpid() immediately after one or more child process have terminated.

    • How do you do this? Can you call waitpid() inside the main for (;;) loop? Obviously we cannot let waitpid() block until a child process terminates – we’d be back to where we started then. You will need to call waitpid() in a non-blocking way. (Hint: look into WNOHANG flag.) But even if you make it non-blocking, can you make your parent process call it immediately after a child process terminates? What if the parent process is being blocked on accept()?

  3. Modify the logging so that it includes the process id of the child process that handled the request. Assuming the logging happens in the child process, you can replace part0’s fprintf() call with the following:

    fprintf(stderr, "%s (%d) \"%s %s %s\" %d %s\n",
        inet_ntoa(clntAddr.sin_addr),
        getpid(),
        method,
        requestURI,
        httpVersion,
        statusCode,
        getReasonPhrase(statusCode));

  4. You don’t have to worry about leaking memory when you terminate with Ctrl-C. However, while your server is running, there should not be any memory leaks – your memory usage should not increase as you run. This requirement applies to all parts of this assignment.

Deliverables

Part 2: Interprocess communication through shared memory

Reading assignment

Required tasks

  1. Since multiple child processes will need to update the stats, you need to keep them in a shared memory segment. Use anonymous memory mapping described in APUE 15.9.

  2. You should count the /statistics request itself in the 2xx count when you serve the page.

  3. Perform the hit test from part 1 and see if your code keeps accurate stats. The request counts may or may not be correct due to race conditions.

  4. Now use POSIX semaphore as described in APUE 15.10 to synchronize access to the stats. A few things to think about:

    • POSIX semaphores can be named or unnamed. Which is a better choice here?

    • Where should you put the sem_t structure?

    • Are we using it as a counting semaphore or a binary semaphore?

    • Are any of the semaphore functions you are calling a “slow” system call? If so, make sure you handle the case where the function is interrupted by a signal. (It is good practice to handle this case regardless of the usage of SA_RESTART.)

  5. Repeat the performance test and verify that the stats are accurate.

Deliverables

Part 3: Directory listing

The skeleton multi-server.c does not handle directory listing. When a requested URL is a directory, it simply responds with 403 Forbidden.

Tasks

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 4: Directory listing without running /bin/ls (0 points)

This part is optional and will not be graded.

Tasks

Requirements and hints

Deliverables (optional)

Part 5: Multi-threaded web server

POSIX threads provide a light-weight alternative to child processes. Instead of creating child processes to handle multiple HTTP requests simultaneously, we will create a new POSIX thread for each HTTP request.

Required tasks

  1. Modify the original skeleton code (part 0) so that the web server creates a new POSIX thread after it accepts a new client connection, and the new thread handles the request and terminates afterwards.

  2. Two library functions used by the skeleton multi-server.c are not thread-safe. You must replace them with their thread-safe counterparts in your code.

    In your README.txt, identify the two functions and describe how you fixed them.

    Note that exit() is also not thread-safe, but do not consider it one of the two functions that you list.

  3. Test this implementation by connecting to it from multiple netcat clients simultaneously.

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 6: Pre-created pool of threads

Reading

Read the following Q&A at StackOverflow.com:

In parts 6 & 7, we will implement the two methods described in the article.

Required tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 5. Instead of creating a new thread for each new client connection, pre-create a fixed number of worker threads in the beginning. Each of the pre-created worker threads will act like the original skeleton web server – i.e., each thread will be in a for(;;) loop, repeatedly calling accept().

  2. Test this implementation by connecting to it from multiple netcat clients simultaneously.

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 7: Blocking queue

Required tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 6 so that only the main thread calls accept(). The main thread puts the client socket descriptor into a blocking queue, and wakes up the worker threads which have been blocked waiting for client requests to handle.

    • After the main thread puts a client socket descriptor into the blocking queue, should it call pthread_cond_signal() or pthread_cond_broadcast()? Or will the server behave correctly both ways (assuming everything else is correct)?

  2. Test this implementation by connecting to it from multiple netcat clients simultaneously.

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 8: Listening on multiple ports

Required tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 7 so that the web server takes not just one, but multiple port numbers as command line arguments (followed by the web root as the last argument.) The web server will bind and listen on all of the ports.

  2. Test this implementation by connecting to it from multiple netcat clients simultaneously to different ports.

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 9: Nonblocking accept() (0 points)

This part is optional and will not be graded.

Part 8 has a flaw. Between select() and accept(), there is a chance that the client connection gets reset. If that happens, in some systems, accept() may block. In order to handle that case, we need to make the server socket nonblocking.

Note that this behavior depends on the version of the system you are running the server on, and may be difficult to reproduce. You are not expected to test this behavior.

Tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 8 so that createServerSocket() sets the server socket into a nonblocking mode.

    • You can use fcntl() to turn on nonblocking right after you create a server socket with a socket() call.

  2. Now accept() will never block. In those cases where it might have blocked, it will now fail with certain errno values. Read the man page to find out which errno values you need to handle.

    • Also don’t forget to handle interruption by signals.

Deliverables

Part 10: Printing request statistics on SIGUSR1

Recall part 2, where we implemented a special admin URL /statistics to fetch a web server request statistics page. In this part, we will implement an alternate mechanism to print statistics.

For this part, we have to go back and start from our part 3 code, which is the last version of multi-server with multiple processes (before we switched to multi-threading in part 5.)

Tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 3 so that when the web server receives a SIGUSR1 signal, it will print the statistics at that time to standard error.

  2. Test it by sending the signal with the kill command while the web server is blocked on an accept() call.

    • Make sure the web server prints out the stats immediately, not when it receives the next HTTP request.

  3. Test it by sending the signal with the kill command to a child process while the child process is in the middle of receiving an HTTP request. Describe what happens and explain why.

    • You are not expected to do anything special about the child processes in this part, which means that the children will inherit the parent’s signal handler. This is not the right design. (Think about why.) You don’t have to fix the behavior. Just explain what happens and why.

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 11: Server-side bash scripts (0 points)

This part is optional and will not be graded. You may skip to part 12.

This part is a challenge for those of you hackers, who are complaining that this assignment has been too easy so far.

In this part, we will enable server-side bash scripts. When a requested URL is an executable script, the web server will run it using /bin/bash, and send back the output of the script.

The web server will ensure that the script will not run longer than a fixed amount of time. The server will also terminate the script if the HTTP client (i.e. the browser) closes the TCP connection while the script is still running.

Getting this right is actually pretty hard. You are not expected to handle every single corner cases. (In fact, our solution doesn’t handle all cases either.) But you can get close. We suggest you approach this in the following order:

  1. Implement support for server-side scripts

    • If the requested file has the execute permission, pass it as an argument to /bin/bash -c.

    • This is pretty much the same as part 3. Replace /bin/ls -al with /bin/bash -c.

    • You can test it with the hostinfo script provided.

  2. Terminate the script when the HTTP connection is closed

    • If the client HTTP connection gets closed while the script is still running (send() will fail in that case), you need to kill the script because there is no point running it when you don’t have anyone to send the result.

    • Killing the script is a bit tricky. Since a bash script by definition will run child processes of its own, you need to send SIGTERM to all of them, not just the bash process. An easy way to achieve this is to make the bash process a group leader by calling setpgid(0, 0) (see the man page for detail), and then later sending SIGTERM to the entire group. The kill and waitpid functions have a way to refer to a group rather than an individual process.

    • You can test it with the loop script provided.

  3. If the script does not respond to SIGTERM (because it’s catching it or ignoring it), send SIGKILL.

    • Set an alarm so that waitpid() is interrupted after 5 seconds.

    • When you return from waitpid(), you need to check if the alarm has fired (if it did, the signal handler was just called), and send SIGKILL only if waitpid() got interrupted by SIGALRM.

    • You can test it with the undying script provided.

  4. Limit the time that the script can run even if the HTTP client is willing to wait.

    • Set an alarm for 10 seconds before you begin reading the bash process’s output.

    • Same SIGTERM & SIGKILL sequence as before. Thus, a script that catches SIGTERM can run up to 15 seconds if the HTTP client does not quit within 10 seconds.

Deliverables (optional)

Part 12: Pre-forked pool of processes

Recall that in part 6 we pre-created a pool of worker threads. Here, we will pre-fork a pool of worker child processes.

What the child processes do is also similar to what the threads did in part 6. The child processes will all be in an infinite loop repeatedly calling accept(). In part 13, we will change this model in a similar way to part 7. In part 7, we passed open socket descriptors to worker threads using a blocking queue. In part 13, we will pass open socket descriptors to worker processes using a UNIX domain socket.

Required tasks

  1. Adapt your code from part 10 (or 11). Pre-fork a fixed number of processes. Each child process will run a for (;;) loop, in which it will call accept() and handle the client connection.

    • After giving birth to all its children, the parent process will wait for all the child processes to terminate, which will never happen because the child processes are in a perpetual loop. See the man page for waitpid to figure out how to wait for any of one’s multiple child processes.

  2. Ensure that only the parent process will handle SIGUSR1 for dumping statistics.

    • Here is how you can do this. Before you start forking, you set it up so that SIGUSR1 is ignored. The disposition will be inherited by the child processes when you fork. After you are done forking, you then set the signal handler. You will also have to move the code that prints the stats.

Deliverables

Part 13: Passing socket descriptors to child processes

In this part, instead of all the child processes calling accept(), only the parent process will call accept(), and it will pass each connected socket to a child process through a UNIX domain socket.

The child process that receives the connected socket will be chosen by round-robin. For example, if you have N child processes, you would pass the first socket to process 1, then process 2, all the way to process N, and then back to process 1, and so on.

Here are sendConnection() & recvConnection() functions that sends and receives open file descriptors through a UNIX domain socket. (You don’t need to understand this code. These are for you to copy & paste, and use it in your multi-server.c.)

// Send clntSock through sock.
// sock is a UNIX domain socket.
static void sendConnection(int clntSock, int sock)
{
    struct msghdr msg;
    struct iovec iov[1];

    union {
        struct cmsghdr cm;
        char control[CMSG_SPACE(sizeof(int))];
    } ctrl_un = {0};
    struct cmsghdr *cmptr;

    msg.msg_control = ctrl_un.control;
    msg.msg_controllen = sizeof(ctrl_un.control);

    cmptr = CMSG_FIRSTHDR(&msg);
    cmptr->cmsg_len = CMSG_LEN(sizeof(int));
    cmptr->cmsg_level = SOL_SOCKET;
    cmptr->cmsg_type = SCM_RIGHTS;
    *((int *) CMSG_DATA(cmptr)) = clntSock;

    msg.msg_name = NULL;
    msg.msg_namelen = 0;

    iov[0].iov_base = "FD";
    iov[0].iov_len = 2;
    msg.msg_iov = iov;
    msg.msg_iovlen = 1;

    if (sendmsg(sock, &msg, 0) != 2)
        die("Failed to send connection to child");
}

// Returns an open file descriptor received through sock.
// sock is a UNIX domain socket.
static int recvConnection(int sock)
{
    struct msghdr msg;
    struct iovec iov[1];
    ssize_t n;
    char buf[64];

    union {
        struct cmsghdr cm;
        char control[CMSG_SPACE(sizeof(int))];
    } ctrl_un;
    struct cmsghdr *cmptr;

    msg.msg_control = ctrl_un.control;
    msg.msg_controllen = sizeof(ctrl_un.control);

    msg.msg_name = NULL;
    msg.msg_namelen = 0;

    iov[0].iov_base = buf;
    iov[0].iov_len = sizeof(buf);
    msg.msg_iov = iov;
    msg.msg_iovlen = 1;

    for (;;) {
        n = recvmsg(sock, &msg, 0);
        if (n == -1) {
            if (errno == EINTR)
                continue;
            die("Error in recvmsg");
        }
        // Messages with client connections are always sent with
        // "FD" as the message. Silently skip unsupported messages.
        if (n != 2 || buf[0] != 'F' || buf[1] != 'D')
            continue;

        if ((cmptr = CMSG_FIRSTHDR(&msg)) != NULL
            && cmptr->cmsg_len == CMSG_LEN(sizeof(int))
            && cmptr->cmsg_level == SOL_SOCKET
            && cmptr->cmsg_type == SCM_RIGHTS)
            return *((int *) CMSG_DATA(cmptr));
    }
}

Required tasks

Requirements and hints

Deliverables

Part 14: Daemonization (0 points)

This part is optional and will not be graded.

In this part, we will make our web server a daemon process. Daemons in UNIX systems are programs that run as background processes typically providing essential system services to users and other programs. See APUE chapter 13 for more information.

Tasks

Adapt your code from part 13. Daemonizing your web server is super easy. Here is what you have to do:

  1. At program start-up (i.e. in the beginning of the main() function maybe after checking arguments), call daemonize() from APUE 13.3.

  2. The daemonize() function will detach the running process from its controlling terminal, so printing to stdout or stderr won’t work anymore. You need to replace the printf() and fprintf() statements with syslog(), described in APUE 13.4.

If you are doing this part, we recommend that you read APUE chapter 13 to learn about daemon processes.

Deliverables (optional)

Good luck!

Acknowledgments

This assignment was co-designed by Jae Woo Lee and Jan Janak as a prototype for a mini-course on advanced UNIX systems and network programming.

Jan Janak wrote the solution code.

Jae Woo Lee is a lecturer, and Jan Janak is a researcher, both at Columbia University. Jan Janak is a founding developer of the SIP Router Project, the leading open-source VoIP platform.

Last updated: 2024-01-27