comp.lang.ruby

Robert Klemme

3/29/2006 9:51:00 AM

Dominik Werder wrote:
> Hello!
>
> While building a little network daemon I stumbled upon the following issue:
>
> I have no idea how much data I can read without blocking. So an attacker
> could simply ignore the protocol and stop the transfer so that my daemon
> blocks forever..
> How do you avoid this simple issue? The only method I found is setting a
> Timeout::timeout 10 do end around the code, but this requires the
> timeout module and I don't know if this works reliable..

You'd typically have a thread that handles a connection. So the worst
case is that a single thread blocks om IO but this does not block the
whole process. You're only out of luck if Ruby is stuck in some long
running call into an external C lib (can be a system call or whatever)
because it doesn't support native threads (yet).

Kind regards

robert