Develop Reference

Nothing being sent to server via URLConnection

So I've created a program that communicates with both a FTP and SQL server. I run my program on my Windows machine and everything is working fine. But when I run the program on my Ubuntu VM it is not working. My code is as follows:
try {
URL url = new URL(location);
System.out.println("Created url");
URLConnection urlc = url.openConnection();
System.out.println("Created URLConnection");
urlc.setDoOutput(true);
System.out.println("Set Output");
OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(urlc.getOutputStream());
System.out.println("Created OutputStreamWriter");
System.out.println("Hello World.");
out.write(Var.pressed);
System.out.println("Wrote String");
out.close();
System.out.println("Closed OutputStreamWriter");
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
The program creates a file on my FTP and then writes to it. The file is being created but it is empty. No errors are ever thrown my program prints the following
Created url
Created URLConnection
Set Output
And then does nothing. It doesn't throw an error, it doesn't crash, it doesn't stop. The terminal is just left open. I also tried just running the .jar but nothing happens.
It seems as though the problem is created here:
OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(urlc.getOutputStream());
Why is nothing being written to the file? And what is wrong with my program if no errors are ever thrown?

It does throw an error,
From everything else, I think you meant to say it doesn't throw an error. My answer is assuming that anyway.
First there are many reasons for a program to hang or wait and not produce an error. Sometimes if you wait long enough a system threshold will be passed and it will timeout even though your program would be happy to wait forever. Other times the system isn't paying attention either. Error conditions are sort of like a courtesy.
I suggest you should try to make the connection with the Ubuntu ftp line command and compare the same with Windows. FTP protocol does some unusual things with ports. The connection opens on one port, but the data transfer connection is switched over to another port. Firewalls can be tripped up with the change of port and prevent the data transfer. This also has created clients that do "passive" versus "active" FTP.

You need to at least get the response code, or the input stream. Otherwise not even a TCP connection is formed. And otherwise you have no idea whether the server accepted your input.
Your title was wildly inaccurate. Obviously you are creating the OutputStreamWriter. Your issue is that nothing is being sent. And the SQL tag was simply irrelevant.

Without an error message it is nearly impossible to figure out why it fails. A few suggestions, though.
First of all, try adding a System.err.println("test") This will prove that the output log will not only catch System.out AKA standard output stream, but also standard error stream.
I asssume, that in after this fix, the ex.printStackTrace() will be visible.
Otherwise: You do not specify how your location String is filled. Are you sure, you have write access to that directory?
If location is /tmp/foo/bar/myFile.txt, make sure the directory /tmp/foo/bar/ exists (mkdir /tmp/foo/bar/) and that the file is accessible (touch /tmp/foo/bar/myFile.txt).
If both report no error AND the first suggestion would bring up no error, the program might really lock up and wait for something from the outside. Difficult to say what at the moment.

Java check com port connection

I am looking for a bit of efficient code that can assist me in monitoring if a com port is still open using the RX/TX libraries.
Lets say I have a hardware device that communicates to the PC using a virtual com port and that device can be plugged in and out at any time. I want to show a connection status on the pc.
I have tried this with something like a buffered reader below and it registered that the device gets disconnected but I have to re-open the port from scratch in another method.
I am looking from something short like comPort.isOpen () or something?
// Set the value of is running
Start.isRunning = true;
// Check to see if the device is connected
while (Start.isRunning) {
// Try to connect to the device
try {
// Create a Buffered Reader
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(serialPort.getInputStream()));
// Read the output
if (Character.toString((char) reader.read()).equalsIgnoreCase(
"^")) {
// Set the connected flag
Start.CONNECTED_FLAG = true;
// Set the connected fag
AddComponents.TFconnected.setText("Connected");
}
// Close the reader
reader.close();
// Let the thread sleep
Thread.sleep(500);
}
// Catch a error if the device is disconnected
catch (Exception err) {
// Set the connected flag
Start.CONNECTED_FLAG = false;
// Set the connected fag
AddComponents.TFconnected.setText("Disconnected");
// Let the thread sleep
Thread.sleep(500);
}
}

Disclaimer: Consider this a partial answer because I do not have intimate knowledge of the workings of serial ports, and my tests could not produce anything useful. Posting here regardless in the hopes any of this is helpful.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no way to receive any kind of "connection / disconnection" event messages. Sadly, as I am not intimately familiar with the workings of serial ports, I cannot give you a full and proper explanation. However, from some research, one of the answers posted in that forum had this to say:
There's no event by the system to inform you of [a disconnection event] because that would require exclusive use of the COM port. If you have a SerialPort object created and have opened a port you should get a CDChanged when a devices is plugged in and unplugged from the serial port. That assumes the device follows the pins standards; not all devices do.
Note that the poster, and the link I've provided, are discussing this within the context of C#. However this seems to be related to how the ports work in general, regardless of language, so I am somewhat confident the same can be applied to RXTX Java.
There are some events you can attempt to listen for. In my tests I was only ever able to receive the DATA_AVAILABLE event, however my setup is a bit different (Raspberry PI) and I can't at the moment physically disconnect the device from the port, I can only attempt to block the device file (which may explain the failure of my test).
If you would like to attempt the event listening yourself, have your class implement SerialPortListener, register for the desired events, check the events in your serialEvent method. Here is an example:
public class YourClass implements SerialPortListener{
private SerialPort serialPort;
// ... serial port gets set up at some point ...
public void registerEvents(){
serialPort.addEventListener(this);
// listen to all the events
serialPort.notifyOnBreakInterrupt(true);
serialPort.notifyOnCarrierDetect(true);
serialPort.notifyOnCTS(true);
serialPort.notifyOnDataAvailable(true);
serialPort.notifyOnDSR(true);
serialPort.notifyOnFramingError(true);
serialPort.notifyOnOutputEmpty(true);
serialPort.notifyOnOverrunError(true);
serialPort.notifyOnParityError(true);
serialPort.notifyOnRingIndicator(true);
}
#Override
public void serialEvent(SerialPortEvent event) {
System.out.println("Received event. Type: " + event.getEventType() + ", old value: " + event.getOldValue() + ", new value: " + event.getNewValue());
}
}
If that ultimately fails, I believe the only other alternative is similar to your current solution; attempt to read from the port, and if it fails, consider it disconnected, and set your indicator accordingly. At each iteration, if it is disconnected, attempt to reconnect; if reconnect succeeds, reset your indicator to "connected".
Sorry I cannot be of more assistance. Hopefully some of that may lead to something useful.
Side Note:
If you want to DRY up your code slightly, put the Thread.sleep(500) in a finally block instead, since it appears to be executed regardless.

Refresh ARP tables programmatically

I have been reading around the topic of getting a list of devices connected to my WIFI hotspot on my phone programmatically.
I found a useful post on stack overflow with the following code and a comment saying
This is incorrect as the ARP tables don't necessarily refresh when a
device disconnects. One say say, that you could simply ping all the
devices in the table to see which IPs are active but it is quite
possible that a device is firewalled to not respond to ICMP request
and your ping would fail. This solution, although a working one, isn't
robust and accurate.
I was wondering, if reading proc/net/arp isn't accurate enough due to refresh issues, how can you force the system to do a refresh to get accurate data?
private int countNumMac()
{
int macCount = 0;
BufferedReader br = null;
try {
br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("/proc/net/arp"));
String line;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
String[] splitted = line.split(" +");
if (splitted != null && splitted.length >= 4) {
// Basic sanity check
String mac = splitted[3];
if (mac.matches("..:..:..:..:..:..")) {
macCount++;
}
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
finally {
try {
br.close();
}
catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
if (macCount == 0)
return 0;
else
return macCount-1; //One MAC address entry will be for the host.
}

The ARP table is not a distributed list of "hosts that are online." It's a local-only list of "hosts that we've seen on this network."
Once you realize this, you'll note that there's no way of removing entries when someone disconnects other than trying to connect to them. Just have a continuous loop in the background, connecting to each host and sending a single ICMP packet (kinda hard to pull off from Java but Android does come with a ping command-line tool).
Granted, hosts that don't reply to ping will be filtered out but depending on the application that might be acceptable.
Alternatively, just let the user try to connect to any of the listed hosts and gracefully time out when the other party is offline. That's what most networking applications do anyway and is the only foolproof way of checking if the host is online.

Ping may often do its arp request and get arp replies from active hosts even if the icmp echo request is subsequently blocked. Therefore ping can in some cases be used to populate the arp table in order to check it for network presence even if icmp is being actively blocked.
But if this is not accurate enough or feels too crude, network presence can be mapped directly using the arp protocol and without involving protocols higher up in the stack which stand a higher risk of being blocked.
arping is the Linux utility commonly used for manual arp level operations (on Linux).
Here is the source code for arping.
Through quick-googling it appears there are utilities for Android which perform corresponding operations, I also found source code which seems to be for arping on Google Android BusyBox.
The arping utility may be usable as is, assuming of course you ensure its presence on your phone. Alternatively one or both of the code variants may serve as inspiration as to how the problem may be programmatically solved in your own code.

ProcessBuilder not executing program correctly

I am currently trying to make a litlle handy tool, you see I am a network administrator and my boss told me that he wanted me to monitor the network and block certain sites and ip for some game servers, so for the monitoring part we are going to redirect all traffic on the network to a server where we can monitor the traffic before sending it to the gateway.
For this we are going to use arpspoof in linux and I have finished a solution for the blocking of sites and servers, and what I am going to make is a GUI that makes it easier for me to handle and control these things and when I tried running arpspoof from java using a ProcessBuilder it does not work and I get no output?
It also does not enter the while loop. I can't really think of more to write atm, but if I can think of more I will update this thread.
My code:
new Thread() {
public void run() {
try {
System.out.println("running arpspoof...");
Process prb = new ProcessBuilder("gksudo", "arpspoof", "-i", "wlan0", Gateway).start();
InputStream is = prb.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is);
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
String line;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println("Output: " + line);
}
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}.start();

I have never used gksudo, but I googled it and it says it's a GUI version of sudo. I'm guessing that you just launched a GUI app which does not write anything to stdout and which does not return. If so, then the code is doing what I would expect. It is blocking until the process writes a line of text that it can read - which never occurs so it blocks indefinitely.
First test your ProcessBuilder code using a trivial command like "echo" to make sure your Java code is working as expected. Then work your way back. Try running your program as root so you don't need the sudo argument and see if that works. Then finally try to run it using sudo instead of gksudo.

I think #user is on the right track, but there are a couple of other possible explanations.
The gksudo command could be asking for a password. I'm not sure where it would ask, but there's a good chance that it won't be the "stdout" stream of the "gksudo" process.
If "gksudo" or the command that you are "gksudo"-ing fails to launch, there is a good chance that it will write an error message to its "stderr" stream. But you are not reading "stderr".
To help diagnose this, you need to try the following:
Look in the log file that for "sudo" - it is "/var/log/secure" on my box.
Use "ps -efl" (or similar) to see what processes exist while your application is blocked waiting for output. (If that is happening ...)
Look to see if "gksudo" is prompting for a password in an unexpected place.
Try temporarily tweaking the "sudoers" file to allow the "arpspoof" command to be "sudo"-ed without a password.

Dynamically find other hosts in a LAN in Java

A while ago I developed a little LAN chat app. in Java which allows chatting with other hosts, send images, etc. Although it was created just for fun, now it's being used where I work.
Currently, there is no "chat server" on the app. where each client registers, updates it's status, etc. (I liked the idea of symmetric design and not depending on a server running on some other machine).
Instead, each host is a client/server which has a hosts.properties file with the hostname of the other hosts, and - for instance - broadcasts to each one of them when sending a massive message/image/whatever.
In the beginning there were just a couple of hosts, so this hosts.properties file wasn't an issue. But as the amount of users increased, the need of updating that file was a bit daunting. So now I've decided to get rid of it, and each time the app. starts, dynammically find the other active hosts.
However, I cannot find the correct way of implement this. I've tried starting different threads, each one of them searching for other hosts in a known range of IP addresses. Something like this (simplified for the sake of readability):
/** HostsLocator */
public static void searchForHosts(boolean waitToEnd) {
for (int i=0; i < MAX_IP; i+= MAX_IP / threads) {
HostsLocator detector = new HostsLocator(i, i+(MAX_IP / threads - 1)); // range: from - to
new Thread(detector).start();
}
}
public void run() {
for (int i=from; i<=to; i++)
findHosts( maskAddress + Integer.toString(i) );
}
public static boolean findHosts(String IP) {
InetAddress address = InetAddress.getByName(IP);
if ( address.isReachable(CONNECTION_TIME_OUT) )
// host found!
}
However:
With a single thread and a low value in CONNECTION_TIME_OUT (500ms) I get wrong Host Not Found status for for hosts actually active.
With a high value in CONNECTION_TIME_OUT (5000ms) and only one single thread takes forever to end
With several threads I've also found problems similar like the first one, due to collisions.
So... I guess there's a better way of solving this problem but I couldn't find it. Any advice? Thanks!

You could try UDP Broadcast to a specific port. All running instances of your app on the network could listen to that port and then respond with a message identifying them as a host.

You could do this a lot easier using UDP. Check this tutorial for examples.

Use Bonjour/Zeroconf.
The jmdns project has all you need.

For finding all hosts in lan in java execute commands from java and add the result to JList
Here is the small code that will help to you to read all hosts in lan in windows there will be other commands for other os take look at the following code
try {
Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();
FileWriter write=new FileWriter("mylist.txt");
BufferedWriter writer=new BufferedWriter(write);
Process pr = rt.exec("net view");
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(pr.getInputStream()));
String line=null;
String hosts="";
while((line=input.readLine()) != null) {
Thread.sleep(100);
if((!(line.equals("")))&&(!(line.equalsIgnoreCase("Server Name Remark")))&&(!(line.equalsIgnoreCase("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------")))&&(!(line.equalsIgnoreCase("The command completed successfully."))))
{
line=line.replace('\\',' ');
line=line.trim();
listModel.addElement(line);
hosts=hosts+line.trim()+",";
hosts=hosts.trim();
}
}
writer.write(hosts);
writer.close();
} catch(Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.toString());
e.printStackTrace();
}

Each host keeps track of all the hosts they have met. When you shut down, save the known hosts to file and reuse the next time you start up.
Every so many minutes, send each of the known hosts a list of all known hosts.
That way
a) No network scanning
b) A new host will spread around the network
Then when a new host joins, he just needs to know 1 other host to learn about everyone.
A host that isn't seen for a week, or is seen from a new IP is dropped from the list of updated.

You could attempt to use DNS service discovery
There seems to be a project on sourceforge (that I have not looked at, beyond doing a cursory search...)