Passing file descriptors

[Carl Banks]

Josiah Carlson wrote:
> I've been working on this for more hours than I'm willing to admit, 
> perhaps someone here can help me make it happen.

When I first saw the subject, I was about to point out that you had
the wrong newsgroup: you want comp.lang.perl.misc

I see you were talking about something else though.


> This us using Python 2.3.3
>  - I do have access to a SunOS 5.8 machine, and the script at the end 
> of this email works.
>  - I need it to work on linux kernel 2.4.x.
> 
> 
> I'm trying to write the equivalent of what the author calls "ringd" 
> described in the below article, and use it with python 2.3.x on linux 2.4:
> http://www.remote.org/jochen/work/pub/zero-downtime.pdf
> 
> 
> The script that I provide at the end of this post is a variation of one 
> posted in this thread:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=7t5i40%241pn%241%40nyheter.chalmers.se&rnum=8
> 
> There is a C version listed later in that article, but I've not yet 
> tried it out.
> 
> Certainly I need a two things:
> 1. Unix domain socket, local socket (standard socket connected locally), 
> or pipe
> 2. sendmsg/recvmsg, fcntl.ioctl, or equivalent file descriptor manipulation
> 
> In the script listed at the end of this post, I use a file descriptor 
> pair returned by os.pipe(), which should be sufficient.  I also use 
> fcntl.ioctl().
> 
> 
> As stated previously, this works properly on SunOS 5.8:
>     jcarlson at synergistic-envision% python2.3 fdpass.py
>     Parent ioctl() returned 0
>     #!/usr/pd/bin/python
>     jcarlson at synergistic-envision%
> 
> It does not work on the linux machine I'm testing it on:
>     [jcarlson at dev jcarlson]$ python fdpass.py
>     [Errno 22] Invalid argument
>     Traceback (most recent call last):
>       File "fdpass.py", line 58, in ?
>         ret = fcntl.ioctl(pRead, fcntl.I_RECVFD, s)
>     IOError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument
>     [jcarlson at dev jcarlson]$
> 
> Seemingly this is because I_SENDFD/I_RECVFD is not properly implemented 
> on linux 2.4, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.
>
> I've also tried using SCM_RIGHTS as per this thread:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=78c7ca81.0402110402.11eb957d%40posting.google.com
> 
> It is not defined in python's fcntl module, but I did find the C 
> definition in the linux /usr/include/bits/socket.h...
>     SCM_RIGHTS = 0x01,          /* Transfer file descriptors.  */
> 
> So I passed the integer 1 manually, on both linux and SunOS 5.8 and got 
> exceptions like I normally do on linux.

Last I checked, you have to use a Unix-domain socket to do this in
Linux.


-- 
CARL BANKS                      http://www.aerojockey.com/software
"If you believe in yourself, drink your school, stay on drugs, and
don't do milk, you can get work." 
          -- Parody of Mr. T from a Robert Smigel Cartoon