Question

Problem Solved – See bottom for solution notes

I’m trying to build a simple app to test an ethernet-capable microcontroller. All I want to do is send and receive small UDP packets. The code is using boost::asio for the networking, and is incredibly simple. For debugging I moved all the intialisation out of the constructors so I could check each step. Here’s the body of my stuff:

    boost::system::error_code myError;

    boost::asio::ip::address_v4 targetIP;
    targetIP.from_string("10.1.1.75", myError);                 // Configure output IP address. HACKHACK--Hardcoded for Debugging
    std::cout << "GetIP - " << myError.message() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "IP: " << targetIP << std::endl;

    boost::asio::ip::udp::endpoint myEndpoint;                  // Create endpoint on specified IP.
    myEndpoint.address(targetIP);
    myEndpoint.port(0x1000);
    std::cout << "Endpoint IP:   " << myEndpoint.address().to_string() << std::endl;
    std::cout << "Endpoint Port: " << myEndpoint.port() << std::endl;

    boost::asio::io_service io_service;                         // Create socket and IO service, bind socket to endpoint.
    udp::socket socket(io_service);
    socket.open( myEndpoint.protocol(), myError );
    std::cout << "Open - " << myError.message() << std::endl;
    socket.bind( myEndpoint, myError );
    std::cout << "Bind - " << myError.message() << std::endl;

    char myMessage[] = "UDP Hello World!";                      // Send basig string, enable socket level debugging.
    socket.send(boost::asio::buffer(myMessage, sizeof(myMessage)), boost::asio::socket_base::debug(true), myError);
    std::cout << "Send - " << myError.message() << std::endl;

    boost::array<char, 128> recv_buf;                           // Receive something (hopefully an echo from the uP)
    udp::endpoint sender_endpoint;
    size_t len = socket.receive_from( boost::asio::buffer(recv_buf), myEndpoint );
    std::cout.write(recv_buf.data(), len);

The snag happens right at the beginning. The address_v4 doesn’t want to accept the IP that I’m passing into it. The output of this app is:

GetIP - The operation completed successfully
IP: 0.0.0.0
Endpoint IP:   0.0.0.0
Endpoint Port: 4096
Open - The operation completed successfully
Bind - The operation completed successfully
Send - A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket is not connected and (when sending on a datagram socket using a sendto call) no address was supplied

I’m assuming the send error is a result of the address_v4 not getting set correctly, but there is no reason that I can think of for such a thing to be taking place.

For those playing along at home, my PC has dual ethernet cards, one of which has been DHCP’d 10.1.1.7, so the target IP should be reachable without any routing. I’m using BOOST 1.46.1 on 32-bit Win7 and MSVS 10. It also fails when I try an IP of 127.0.0.1, correct me if I’m wrong but that should work for loopback in this context?

Edit with Updates:

So thanks to the earlier answers I’ve gotten the IP address into my address_v4, and I’m no longer trying to bind when I meant to use connect. The significanly changed section of code is the TX, which now looks like:

    socket.open( targetEndpoint.protocol(), myError );
    std::cout << "Open - " << myError.message() << std::endl;
    char myMessage[] = "UDP Hello World!";                      // Send basig string, enable socket level debugging.
    socket.send_to(boost::asio::buffer(myMessage, sizeof(myMessage)), targetEndpoint, boost::asio::socket_base::debug(true), myError);
    std::cout << "Send - " << myError.message() << std::endl;

(I renamed myEndpoint to targetEndpoint to help reduce confusion…..)

I now get the error while trying to send:
The attempted operation is not supported for the type of object referenced
I would give my firstborn for an informative error message at this point! The error is consistent regardless of which target port I use. The only thing I can think of is that I need to be setting the source port somewhere, but I don’t see how you can do that in any of the boost::asio documentation.

Final Resolution

I have managed to make this work, so I’m going to post the gotchas that I found in a nice neat list for anyone else who stumbles across this answer with similar problems to me. I think the main issue I had was that none of the boost examples ever show how to connect to a specified IP, they all use a resolver. It made the examples a lot harder to understand for me.

• When using the from_string call to convert a text IP, use the syntax from the first answer below rather than my syntax above!

• When setting up the UDP socket, order of operations is crucial! If you don’t want to do it in the constructor you need to:

  1. Open the socket using the required protocol.
  2. Bind the socket to a local endpoint which specifies the source UDP port number.
  3. Connect the socket to the remote endpoint which specifies the destination IP and Port number.

  Attempting to bind after the connect will cause the bind to fail. The transmission will operate just fine, but your packets will be sent from an arbitrary port number.

• Use a send method to actually transmit. Do not attempt to enable debugging data with boost::asio::socket_base::debug(true)! All this flag seems to do is cause error messages within an otherwise functional send!

I’d also like to share that my most valuable debugging tool in this entire exercise was Wireshark. Maybe it’s only because I’m used to having a CRO or Protocol Analyser when I’m working on comms like this, but I found being able to see the bytes-on-wire display helped me sort out a whole bucketload of stuff that I would otherwise never have tracked down.

Cheers for your help on the IP issues and helping me realise the difference between connect and bind.

Answer 1

The problem you are currently seeing appears to be your usage of this line:

targetIP.from_string("10.1.1.75", myError); 

boost::asio::ip::address::from_string is a static function, that returns a constructed ip::address object. Change it to look like this:

targetIP = boost::asio::ip::address::from_string("10.1.1.75", myError); 

And your IP address should be populated properly.