http.sys implementation - windows

We all know that there's a big sweet piece o' binary named http.sys kernel-mode driver in our Windows that does HTTP handling for us. That is basically all we know about it.
But today I thought: hey, all our networking stuff like TCP/IP and whatnot is here, in userland -- ws2_32.dll's providers (in mswsock.dll) and all its friends. Since there are userland components, there is no way http.sys uses them. The question is: how do they do it? Any informative links will be greatly appreciated.

I would imagine that HTTP.SYS utilizes Windows Kernel Sockets to achieve it's objectives. See here as well.

http.sys is only meant to be used as server component listening for HTTP/HTTPS requests - basically IIS depends on it to achieve good performance. It is not used to make any client requests using Winsock library. You can read more here.

Found a good answer to the question here: http://www.codemachine.com/article_tdi.html
It appears that there is much, much more to networking in Windows than Winsock shows us.

Related

Sending messages between computers

I'd like to start investigating client/server communication. I've started to look at Distributed Objects and a tad at CFNetwork. Let's just say I'm looking for something more my speed (which is slower).
I'd like to be able to send a message from one computer to another, possibly carrying a string or some other type of data. I'm thinking of building a simple student response system where one computer is acting as a server and the clients are connecting and sending data to it.
I'm looking for resources that might help me out as well as suggestions of where to start understanding the concepts involved. I've been teaching myself Objective-C and am a relative newbie to programming, so I know I have holes in my understanding.
"Sockets" is the canonical answer.
If you're interested, here's a great introduction to socket programming (biased toward C, but still very informative):
Beej's Guide to Network Programming
Another way of doing it really simple is by letting the server set up a local http server (inside it self), and then let the clients simply make http requests. By doing that you let the http layer do all the fancy sockets stuff. More simple, and with more overhead, but may be suitable for your case. Also a lot easier to debug, since you can use your browser to test the connection. There are many ways of implementing a HTTP server in cocoa, can't remember which one i've used, but a quick google pointed me at this one for example

Solution for creating a firewall filter layer (c/c++) on Windows?

I'm developing an app for filtering network connections from clients to my server (deny or allow to connect to my server).
I'm researching and found some resources like Windows Firewall API.
But I don't know if it's necessary for me or not.
What's the best API or solution to resolve it?
Thank so much.
regards,
Why don't you use an already-developed and proven app in the first place? If you really want to develop a filtering layer then what you need is a Filter driver and more specifically NDIS filter . A sample solution can be found here. But unless you are absolutely sure what you are doing and what you want to achieve I'd strongly suggest that you stick to an off-the-shelf solution - any firewall will be decent, or even a linux machine in front of your server with appropriate iptables rules.
Since you are working in a windows operating system. You would have to make use of Windows Filtering Platform as seen in the documentation on https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366510.aspx
Drivers like TDS,LSP, and NDIS are all deprecated.
The programming language is C++. In my experience, it was a desktop application with the GUI in WxWidget and writing the filtering network connections hooks into the user mode.
There are two Filtering Layer Identifiers (Run-time Filtering Layer Identifiers and Management Filtering Layer Identifiers ), i made used of the earlier being that its more effective.
Should you need more assistance let me know.

How to set up a computer network with ruby

I would like to set up a network with some computers I have, where they can connect to one main source, then receive and send messages back to it. I have never done any network programming before, so I'm just wondering what are the best tutorials using Ruby that I could use.
Thanks in advance.
There are about a billion ways you could do this. Could you post more about what the problem is you're trying to solve, or what the content/purpose/size/format/etc. of the messages is to be? Are you building something "for real" or just trying to learn network programming?
Also, do you already have the lower layer stuff figured out? You have networking infrastructure setup, IP addresses assigned, etc? If not, you'll need to get through that. Once you have that, you could start with a tutorial on basic socket programming in Ruby, but - depending on the answers to the questions above - you might not want to "roll your own" solution at that level. The answer might be to use an XMPP (Jabber) server, and use an XMPP client library, or you might want to deploy something like ActiveMQ, HornetQ, etc. and use a library for interfacing with that. Or maybe you want to use HTTP and pass messages around in JSON, or XML or $WHATEVER. In short, there are a LOT of options in this area.

Personal Internet use monitoring

How could a (Windows) desktop application be created to monitor the amount of time spent on a particular website?
My first idea was to play with the Host file to intercept requests, log, and proxy. This feels a bit clunky; and I suspect my program would look like malware.
I feel like there is a smarter way? Any ideas?
There is a tool similar to what you are looking for called K-9 Web Protection. It is more used for parents to monitor what their kids are up to when hooked up to the internet. I have installed this for my niece's computer with good results and praises as it blocks, content filter, restrict internet times. This may be OTT for your needs but worth a shot as you can see what sites were visited.
The other, is to use a dedicated firewall monitoring solution such as IPCOP which is a Linux based distribution with a sole purpose in providing a proxy, stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall, Intrusion Detection System (IDS).
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
You could do this by monitoring active connections via netstat, or if you need more advanced data you can install The Windows Packet Capture Library and get any data about network use, and inside your desktop app, find network traffic that relates to 'spending time' on a website (which might just be GET requests for you, but I don't know), and record various statistics as required.
Route the traffic through a scriptable proxy and change the browser settings to point to that proxy.

How to add proxy support to c# socket connection?

I have a socket app that needs to have support for SOCKS 4 and 5 proxy connections, since my users may be behind firewalls. I am using WPF and C# 3.5 SP1. I see no options in the default Socket class for proxys, do I have to roll my own?
I'd prefer not to use 3rd party libs if possible - how difficult is it to enable proxy support with a standard C# Socket?
It is not terribly hard but you have to read through a couple of RFCs. You need to read the RFC spec on Socks v4, Socks v4a and Socks v5. I wrote a library that will do all the work for you but if you would rather write you own that is cool too. My library was mentioned in the previous post (Starksoft). You can implement the Socks protocol using a standard TcpClient object or a Socket connection. The TcpClient is easier. You simply need to send the commands immediately after connection to your proxy server. Those command will instruct the proxy server what final end point you are interested in connecting to. There is also specs for a UDP Socks connection but it sounds like you won't be needing that.
You can find all the RFCs and generation information on wikipedia. I can't post more because this crazy stackoverflow site limits the number of hyperlinks I am allowed to 1 since I am not a regular user. Very annoying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS
Finally, you can rip off my code if you like since it is under the MIT license and I let you do that kind of thing. :) Take at look at my class Socks4ProxyClient.cs that implements the Socks v4 protocol. The method of most interest to you is named SendCommand() located on line 282. You can find my code at Google Code. Search for Starksoft. Or you can go to my web site directly and I have link to the source code in Google.
Socks5 implementation is a little trickier with more options to specify and a little more chatter to the server but basically very similar to Socks4.
Good luck and you should implement a solution yourself if you want to learn Socks. So, kudos to you!
Benton
You could ask google for some info. One of the first links will lead you to Mentalis.org and their free proxy implementation. They were once well known for their free network and security stuff but the projects seem to not being maintained for a while.
But it might be worth a look anyway.
I know you said that you did not want to use 3rd party librarys if possbile, but I would like to recommend this http://www.starksoft.com/prod_proxy.html.

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