Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 21:10:47 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: "Lucas (a.k.a T-Bird or bsdfan3)" <tbird-contact@cox.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Variable length packets? Message-ID: <20040831021047.GC33896@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <000301c48efa$bfa00500$c022fc18@yourxu5v9frokn> References: <000301c48efa$bfa00500$c022fc18@yourxu5v9frokn>
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In the last episode (Aug 30), Lucas (a.k.a T-Bird or bsdfan3) said: > I am trying to implement a custom protocol that sends and receives > variable-length packets on top of TCP/IPv4. The problem is that the > length field of the packet is silently being mangled first becoming 0 > and then getting turned into a very large number (about 2-3 billion). > The length field is a u_int32_t and I am using the byteorder > routines. Source code snippets follow: > > --decl of struct packet_t-- > struct packet_t > { > u_int16_t num; > u_int32_t len; > char data[0]; > }; If these are different OSes, the structure may be packed differently. There's almost certainly two bytes of padding between num and len to ensure that len is 32-bit aligned, for example. If you run ktrace on your client (or server), the kdump output will include a hexdump of all data read or written, which might help you determine what's going wrong. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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