[Twisted-Python] Keeping a list of connected PB clients
Phil Christensen
phil at bubblehouse.org
Sat Nov 25 22:38:15 EST 2006
On Nov 25, 2006, at 2:33 PM, Yi Qiang wrote:
> What I am having trouble with is getting access to the clients IP
> address. This is not something I can pass in in the
> PBClientFactory's login method, since many computers are NAT'ed.
I'm not sure if I understand you here, are you saying that you *are*
passing in the client's IP? There's fundamentally no way for the
server to know the IP of a NAT'd client unless the client sends it.
> Yes, this is something I do have trouble with. I will look into
> the singleton pattern. It would be nicer if there was a convenient
> way to bubble up the list of clients.
I agree. I would be particularly interested in findnig an direct
interface into the reactor that allows me to at least view, if not
manipulate connected clients. Something similar to netstat's output
would be ideal.
Any other Twisted devs know something I don't in this matter?
> On Nov 24, 2006, at 6:46 PM, Phil Christensen wrote:
>> One thing this approach doesn't do is keep track of clients that
>> connect, but fail authentication. To do that, you'd need to
>> subclass Broker, but that's a tough one. I looked into this once
>> before, and it certainly appears doable -- in the end, a Broker is
>> still a Protocol, which means it has a transport property you can
>> get client addresses out of.
>
> This is exactly what I need to do so I can associate a client with
> both their username and ip address. I have access to the broker if
> I subclass PBServerFactory, but I am not sure how to access it from
> the Realm, or if it is possible at all.
Well, the actual act of replacing the broker is easy, you just do this:
> from twisted.spread import pb
> pb.PBServerFactory.protocol = MyBrokerSubclass
This will make all future PB servers you create use your new protocol.
Of course, that's not the hard part ;-).
It should definitely be possible to wedge yourself in there between
the various connection handlers, but it's non-trivial. There's also a
high likelihood that you may need to modify/subclass other classes,
which may or may not have an appropriate interface for doing so.
I think the end result wouldn't really be worth the investment of
time. If your server *really* needs detailed information about
connected clients at a very raw level, but also requires the power of
Perspective Broker, you might try splitting your app into two pieces.
You could mimic the old-school FTP approach, and create a main
control channel that speaks a custom, albeit simple protocol. All
this channel would do is handle the connected clients, and provide
some kind of token to them that they could pass back to the PB server.
If you need to be sure of security, you could generate random names
for the remote objects you wish your clients to interact with, and
have the clients provide that name to the PB server on each request.
There are probably a number of other approaches that could provide
even tighter security.
If this won't do the trick for you, you might need to provide a
little more information about what you're actually trying to accomplish.
-phil
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