Develop Reference

HttpURLConnection request showing up in Android Studio profiler but not reaching microcontroller

I'm trying to access a local IP using an Android app with HttpURLConnection. The web server is working, I tested it with Postman. Using a microcontroller I can see when someone connects to that IP address, so I know it's something in my app that's not working.
I have the app set up so that it sends a POST request, and when I press the button the Android Studio profiler detects the request and shows the IP address, but it won't reach the microcontroller.
String urlString = "http://192.168.2.115/request"; // URL to call
OutputStream out = null;
try {
URL url = new URL(urlString);
HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.connect();
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.getMessage();
}
I enabled the INTERNET and the ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE permissions in AndroidManifest.xml and am not yet sending or receiving any data, just trying to access the IP address
Any help is appreciated, thank you!
Edit: It works now, I needed to add conn.getInputStream(); after conn.connect, for whatever reason

In which thread do you try to make http connection? Android system is prohibit to make network connection on main thread. Probably should use AsyncTask/RxJava/Thread.

Why my HTTPS file download corrupts .zip files?

I'm trying to download zip files from internet using following code:
public void getFile(String updateURL) throws Exception {
URL url = new URL(updateURL);
HttpURLConnection httpsConn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
httpsConn.setRequestMethod("GET");
TrustModifier.relaxHostChecking(httpsConn);
int responseCode = httpsConn.getResponseCode();
if (responseCode == HttpsURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {
String fileName = "fileFromNet";
try (FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(fileName)) {
ReadableByteChannel rbc = Channels.newChannel(httpsConn.getInputStream());
outputStream.getChannel().transferFrom(rbc, 0, Long.MAX_VALUE);
}
}
httpsConn.disconnect();
}
TrustModifier is a class used to solve the "trust issue": http://www.obsidianscheduler.com/blog/ignoring-self-signed-certificates-in-java/
The code above works well for zip files available via plain http or for non compressed files exposed via https but but if I try to download a zip file exposed via https endpoint only a small fragment of original file will be downloaded. I have tested with different download links from internet and always got the same result.
Does anybody has an idea what I've been doing wrong here?
Thank you.

transferFrom() must be called in a loop until the transfer is complete, and in this case the only way you can know that is by adding up the return values of transferFrom() until they equal the Content-length of the HTTP response.

Actually the problem was in the TrustModifier Class I was using to switch off the servier certificate check. Once I removed it because I didn't need it any longer (I took the certificate from server and put it in a local trust store), my problem was solved.

How can I read a text file from the internet with Java?

I want to read the second line of the text at this URL: "http://vuln2014.picoctf.com:51818/" (this is a capture-the-flag competition but only asking for flags or direction to flags breaks the competition rules). I am attempting to open an input stream from the URL but I get an Invalid HTTP Response exception. Any help is appreciated, and I recognize that my error is likely quite foolish.
Code:
URL url = new URL("http://vuln2014.picoctf.com:51818");
URLConnection con = url.openConnection();
InputStream is = con.getInputStream()
The error occurs at the third line.
java.io.IOException: Invalid Http response at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1342) at name.main(name.java:41)
curl happily gets the text from the page, and it is perfectly accessible from a web browser.

When you do this:
URL url = new URL("http://vuln2014.picoctf.com:51818");
URLConnection con = url.openConnection();
You are entering into a contract that says that this URL uses the http protocol. When you call openConnection it expects to get http responses because you used http:// in the URL as the protocol. The Java Documentation says:
If for the URL's protocol (such as HTTP or JAR), there exists a public, specialized URLConnection subclass belonging to one of the following packages or one of their subpackages: java.lang, java.io, java.util, java.net, the connection returned will be of that subclass. For example, for HTTP an HttpURLConnection will be returned, and for JAR a JarURLConnection will be returned.
The server you are connecting to just returns a couple lines of data. I retrieved them with the command nc vuln2014.picoctf.com 51818. There is no http response code like HTTP/1.1 200 OK:
Welcome to the Daedalus Corp Spies RSA Key Generation Service. The public modulus you should use to send your updates is below. Remember to use exponent 65537.
b4ab920c4772c5247e7d89ec7570af7295f92e3b584fc1a1a5624d19ca07cd72ab4ab9c8ec58a63c09f382aa319fa5a714a46ffafcb6529026bbc058fc49fb1c29ae9f414db4aa609a5cab6ff5c7b4c4cfc7c18844f048e3899934999510b2fe25fcf8c572514dd2e14c6e19c4668d9ad82fe647cf9e700dcf6dc23496be30bb
In this case I would use java.net.Socket to establish a connection and then read the lines. This is a simplistic approach that assumes there are 2 lines of data:
Socket theSocket;
try {
theSocket = new Socket("vuln2014.picoctf.com", 51818);
BufferedReader inFile = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(theSocket.getInputStream()));
String strGreet = inFile.readLine();
String strData = inFile.readLine();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
As for why curl and browsers may render it properly? They are likely more lenient about the data they read and will just dump what is read from the port even if it doesn't conform to the specified protocol (like http)

Tracking the number of users in a Java application

So I have a Java application and I'm wanting to count the number of users who are using the application at any given time. The way I've opted to do this is to host a 777 txt file and add a character to the file whenever a user opens the app, count the characters in order to determine how many users are 'online', and then remove a character when the application is closed.
So far I haven't been able to write to the txt file effectively, and my doubts about the effectiveness of this method are being confirmed. It seems really clumsy. Does anyone have any better ideas about how to achieve this goal?
Here's a snippet of the code I'm using to write to the txt file:
URL url;
URLConnection urlConn;
try {
url = new URL("http://blalalah.com/blah.txt");
urlConn = url.openConnection();
urlConn.setDoInput(true);
urlConn.setDoOutput(true);
urlConn.setUseCaches(false);
urlConn.setRequestProperty ("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(urlConn.getOutputStream());
dos.writeBytes("#");
dos.flush();
dos.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println(e);
}

Getting "java.net.ProtocolException: Server redirected too many times" Error

I'm making a simple URL request with code like this:
URL url = new URL(webpage);
URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
InputStream is = urlConnection.getInputStream();
But on that last line, I'm getting the "redirected too many times error". If my "webpage" var is, say, google.com then it works fine, but when I try to use my servlet's URL then it fails. It seems I can adjust the number of times it follows the redirects (default is 20) with this:
System.setProperty("http.maxRedirects", "100");
But when I crank it up to, say, 100 it definitely takes longer to throw the error so I know it is trying. However, the URL to my servlet works fine in (any) browser and using the "persist" option in firebug it seems to only be redirecting once.
A bit more info on my servlet ... it is running in tomcat and fronted by apache using 'mod-proxy-ajp'. Also of note, it is using form authentication so any URL you enter should redirect you to the login page. As I said, this works correctly in all browsers, but for some reason the redirect isn't working with the URLConnection in Java 6.
Thanks for reading ... ideas?

It's apparently redirecting in an infinite loop because you don't maintain the user session. The session is usually backed by a cookie. You need to create a CookieManager before you use URLConnection.
// First set the default cookie manager.
CookieHandler.setDefault(new CookieManager(null, CookiePolicy.ACCEPT_ALL));
// All the following subsequent URLConnections will use the same cookie manager.
URLConnection connection = new URL(url).openConnection();
// ...
connection = new URL(url).openConnection();
// ...
connection = new URL(url).openConnection();
// ...
See also:
Using java.net.URLConnection to fire and handle HTTP requests

Duse, I have add this lines:
java.net.CookieManager cm = new java.net.CookieManager();
java.net.CookieHandler.setDefault(cm);
See this example:
java.net.CookieManager cm = new java.net.CookieManager();
java.net.CookieHandler.setDefault(cm);
String buf="";
dk = new DAKABrowser(input.getText());
try {
URL url = new URL(dk.toURL(input.getText()));
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(url.openStream());
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = dis.readLine()) != null) {
buf+=inputLine;
output.append(inputLine+"\n");
}
dis.close();
}
catch (MalformedURLException me) {
System.out.println("MalformedURLException: " + me);
}
catch (IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("IOException: " + ioe);
}
titulo.setText(dk.getTitle(buf));

I was using Jenkins on Tomcat6 on a unix environment and got this bug. For some reason, upgrading to Java7 solved it. I'd be interested to know exactly why that fixed it.

I had faced the same problem and it took considerable amount of time to understand the problem.
So to summarize the problem was in mismatch of headers.
Consider below being my Resource
#GET
#Path("booksMasterData")
#Produces(Array(core.MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON))
def booksMasterData(#QueryParam("stockStatus") stockStatus : String): Response = {
// some logic here to get the books and send it back
}
And here is client code, which was trying to connect to my above resource
ClientResponse clientResponse = restClient.resource("http://localhost:8080/booksService").path("rest").path("catalogue").path("booksMasterData").accept("application/boks-master-data+json").get(ClientResponse.class);
And the error was coming on exactly above line.
What was the problem?
My Resource was using
"application/json"
in
#Produces annotation
and my client was using
accept("application/boks-master-data+json")
and this was the problem.
It took me long to find out this as the error was no where related. Break through was when I tried to access my resource in postman with
Accept-> "application/json" header
it worked fine, however with
Accept-> "application/boks-master-data+json" header
it doesnt.
And again, even Postman was not giving me proper error. The error was too generic. Please see the below image for reference.