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Remoting with Firewall tunnelingThis article is taken from content omitted during technical review of the a book entitled Network programming for .NET (Buy at Amazon UK) (Buy at Amazon US) It can be very misleading to say Remoting can tunnel firewalls. It can, in one direction only! If your object if hosted in a stub network, there isn’t a hope that anybody on the Internet can use it. There is an open-source bi-directional TCP channel available from www.ingorammer.com which properly implements firewall tunnelling in both directions. It uses persistent connections, with no requirement for an external message store. However, space constraints prevent the class in its entirety to be published in this book. The sample application provided in this chapter uses remoting in preference to a socket based implementation to simplify the code, and not out of necessity. Data sent between peers, is temporarily stored in a database. Any code that can execute arbitrary SQL statements against a database could be used to implement the peer in this instance. Implementing a firewall tunnelThe system in mind is an inter-network file transfer P2P system. With this, users on one stub network, will be able to retrieve files from computers on a separate stub network, with the help of a Server, which has a public IP address. The server maintains a database, which contains all the requests and responses made by peers. Peers will be able to call methods on a remote object that can run queries against this database. To transfer a file from one peer to another, this is the procedure: · Peer A, sends a request to the server, for Peer B to send a file. · The server stores the request in the database · Peer B, asks the server to check if there are any new requests for files. · The server tells peer B that Peer A wanted a file · Peer B sends the file to the server. · Peer A asks the server if the file has been uploaded yet. · The server returns the file to Peer A From this specification, we can see what methods are required of the remote object C# public void postRequest(string requestingPeer, string filename, string respondingPeer)
public void postResponse(string respondingPeer, string filename, string fileContents, string requestingPeer)
public string checkRequests(string peer)
public string checkResponse(string respondingPeer, string filename) VB.NET Public Sub postRequest(ByVal requestingPeer As String, _ ByVal filename As String, ByVal respondingPeer As String) Public Sub postResponse(ByVal respondingPeer As String, _ ByVal filename As String, ByVal fileContents As String, _ ByVal requestingPeer As String)
Public Function checkRequests(ByVal peer As String) As String
Public Function checkResponse(ByVal respondingPeer As String, _ ByVal filename As String) As String
In the P2P world, everything is asynchronous. This means that there is an indefinite time period between one peer calling postRequest and the recipient peer calling checkRequests. Therefore to hold the data temporarily between posts and checks, we may use a database. A detailed description on how to create an Access database is described in chapter 2. The database can also be developed. It should contain two tables, requests and responses, the former containing fields id (auto number), requester (text), filename (text), respondent (text). The latter containing fields id (auto number), requester (text), fileContents (Memo), filename (text), respondent (text).
Save the database as c:\filetransfer.mdb Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7Copyright 2013 Open Merchant Account Ltd. |
