Re: In airplane mode, socket writes unexpectedly don't fail
Re: In airplane mode, socket writes unexpectedly don't fail
- Subject: Re: In airplane mode, socket writes unexpectedly don't fail
- From: Mike Dolan <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2018 17:08:57 -0700
- Thread-topic: In airplane mode, socket writes unexpectedly don't fail
Back in Mono 4 days, we had to work around an issue where our macOS app would
get "stuck" if a laptop was wandering through an airport and latched on to a
captive portal page that intercepted one of our messages back to our server.
And when I say latched on, we never recovered until the app was restarted. We
had to dig into the mono code and figure out how to reset it ourselves. I think
that this was fixed in Mono 5 (or later Mono 4). Not sure which version you're
working with, but this might be something to look into.
Sorry I don’t have a lot of details off the top of my head. It was a couple of
years ago and I have been trying to put this out of my mind ever since (
--
Mike
On 10/30/2018, 4:41 PM, "Macnetworkprog on behalf of Jens Alfke"
<macnetworkprog-bounces+mike=email@hidden on behalf of
email@hidden> wrote:
A co-worker is struggling with handling online/offline transitions in some
networking code in a Xamarin (i.e. Mono, i.e. .NET) app for iOS. The code
maintains a TCP socket to a server. If the device goes offline or into Airplane
Mode, the code needs to close the socket, so that the higher levels of the app
know it’s not online anymore.
The behavior he’s reporting is that, when the device is put into Airplane
Mode, the socket acts as though it’s still connected. It doesn’t close, and
(obviously) doesn’t receive any data, but most strangely the socket doesn’t
fail after data is written to it. My knowledge of TCP tells me that if you
write to a socket, but no ACK packet is received within ~15 seconds, the socket
will be closed with an error (I think ECONNRESET?) But he swears this isn’t
happening — it’s like the writes go to /dev/null.
I’ve never seen this, but I’ve mostly been using NSURLSession or at least
NSStream, not POSIX socket APIs, so the behavior may be different. My first
guess was that Mono is doing something sketchy; he looked into the source code
and found that it uses send() instead of write() to write to the TCP socket; is
that kosher?
The workaround he’s adopting is to run a SCNetworkReachability notifier,
and to close the socket and go into offline mode when notified that the host is
unreachable. I’m uncomfortable with this, since I know Reachability can be
unreliable and this usage doesn’t go along with the best practices, i.e. using
it just as a trigger to connect, not disconnect.
So what’s the deal with Airplane Mode? I would assume that it takes down
all network interfaces, which would close all sockets. But it doesn’t. Even so,
I would assume that writing to a TCP socket would cause an error pretty soon;
but apparently it doesn’t.
Any advice?
—Jens
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