Question

I’ve just run into a problem with my ISP who it seems refuses to allow me to use fsockopen telling me its a security risk and that I have to find an alternative suggesting that I use perl.

Does anyone have an alternative to fsockopen possibly using perl for the script below?

<?php

// fetches server information from minequery.
function fetch_server_info($ip, $port){
    $socket = fsockopen($ip, $port, $errno, $errstr, 0.5);

    if($socket === false){
        return false;   
    }

    fwrite($socket, "QUERY_JSON\n");

    $responce = stream_get_contents($socket);

    return json_decode($responce, true);
}

?>

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to get the response from the server into $responce without using any of the socket functions in PHP. If shell_exec() is enabled by your hosting provider, you can run an external program to do this instead. Here’s an example using perl:

<?php

// fetches server information from minequery.
function fetch_server_info($ip, $port){
    $script = <<<'EOF'
use warnings;
use strict;
use IO::Socket;

die if $#ARGV+1 != 2;
my $ip = $ARGV[0];
my $port = $ARGV[1];
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => "$ip:$port") or die;
print $sock "QUERY_JSON\n" or die;
local $/ = undef;
print <$sock>;
EOF;

    $responce = shell_exec("echo '$script' | perl - $ip $port");

    if ($responce == NULL)
        return false;

    return json_decode($responce, true);
}

$>

Or you could use netcat if they have it:

<?php

// fetches server information from minequery.
function fetch_server_info($ip, $port){
    $responce = shell_exec("echo QUERY_JSON| nc $ip $port");

    if ($responce == NULL)
        return false;

    return json_decode($responce, true);
}

$>