EP2120 Internetworking/Internetteknik

IK2218 Internets Protokoll och Principer

Homework Assignment 3

Solutions due 20:00, October 1, 2019

Review due 20:00, October 4, 2019

Problems

1. Socket Interface (15 p)

The pseudo-code sample below (with most details omitted) describes an application that uses the
socket interface (API) for communication.

s = socket(…);
bind(s, …);
listen(s, …);
while true {
t = accept(s, …);
recv(t, …);
ProcessRequest(…);
send(t, …);
close(t);
}

a) Is the sample code for a client or a server? Does it use TCP or UDP? Explain your answer. (5 p)
b) The textbook gives two examples of communication using the socket interface: 1) connection-
oriented, concurrent communication and 2) connectionless, iterative communication.
Characterize the communication in the sample code using this terminology. (5 p)
c) In practice, this kind of communication is not frequently used. What is the main limitation?
(5 p)

Solution

a) The code is for a TCP server. It does not initiate the communication itself; instead, it waits to
be contacted. Hence, it is a server. Only a TCP server uses listen() and accept().
b) Connection-oriented, iterative communication.
c) The server can only deal with one client request at a time. (How severe that limitation would be
depends on the complexity of the request processing, represented by the ProcessRequest()
function.)

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2. Web (35 p)
Suppose that you click on a link on a web page, which causes the following HTTP request to be
sent.

GET /swordfish HTTP/1.1

Host: www.feathers.org
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/
*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_5)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.76
Safari/537.36
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8

a) Which web document does the browser request? Answer by giving the URL. (3 p)
b) Which version of HTTP is the browser using? What kind of connection is requested, persistent
or non-persistent? (Note that the textbook does not cover header fields related to persistence,
so you may want to consult other resources, on the Internet for example.) (3 p)

The server gives the following response:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2019 12:34:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: https://www.feathers.org/swordfish
Content-Length: 286
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

more data…

c) What kind of connection does the server accept, persistent or non-persistent? (3 p)

d) The server seems to give a positive response (“302 Found”), but this is not the normal response
for a successful request. Answer the following three questions: Why does the server give this
response? What is the browser supposed to do? Why do you think the server has been
configured to respond in this way? (6 p)
e) Assume that you instead receive a “200 OK” response with an HTML object that contains
three other objects (it could be a web page with three images, for instance). How long time
does it take from that you click on the link until the entire document has been received, for the
four cases below? Explain your solutions.
1. Non-persistent HTTP.
2. Non-persistent HTTP. The client can use multiple TCP connections in parallel, as many as
needed.
3. Persistent HTTP without HTTP pipelining.
4. Persistent HTTP with HTTP pipelining.
The round-trip time between client and server is RTT. Assumed that all objects are very small,
and the connection is fast, so transmission time is negligible, and so is processing time on the
server. Moreover, you need not consider the time it takes to close down a TCP connection (it
takes place in the background). (20 p)

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Solution

a) http:/www.feathers.org/swordfish
b) HTTP version 1.1. The browser is requesting a persistent connection.
c) The server accepts a non-persistent connection.
d) 1) This response is a normal response when a page is moved. 2) The client is redirected to the
new location, as specified by the “Location” header, so the client should send another request
for the new object. 3) In this case, the client is redirected from a non-encrypted connection to
an encrypted connection, i.e., from a URL with “http:” to a URL with “https:”, so the server
has been configured to enforce encrypted communication.
e) The transaction involves fetching the main HTML object, and then the three objects it
contains.
1. 8×RTT. First one TCP SYN/ACK and one HTTP request/response for the main HTML
object. Then, for each contained object, one TCP SYN/ACK and one HTTP
request/response.
2. 4×RTT. First one TCP SYN/ACK plus one HTTP request/response for the main HTML
object. Then the contained objects are fetched in parallel, each with a TCP SYN/ACK and
an HTTP request/response.
3. 5×RTT . One TCP SYN/ACK and then one HTTP request/response for each object.
4. 3×RTT. First one TCP SYN/ACK plus one HTTP request/response for the main HTML
object. Then the client uses HTTP pipelining and sends requests for the contained objects
back-to-back, without waiting for responses in between. The responses are returned back-
to-back.
Grading suggestions: The main thing here is to demonstrate an understanding of how TCP
SYN/ACK and HTTP request/response are combined. In which order are they performed, and
what can be done in parallel? Incomplete or missing explanations render deduction in points.

3. Mail (25 p)

Consider the scenario when Alice (left) sends an email to Bob (right). There are two intermediate
systems: outgoing mail server and incoming mail server.

Consider the following questions:

a) What is the purpose of the outgoing mail server? Discuss what would happen if it were
removed, so that Alice’s user agent directly connects to the incoming mail server. What would
be the limitations (if any)? (10 p)
b) What is the purpose of the incoming mail server? Discuss what would happen if it were
removed, so that the outgoing mail server connects directly to Bob’s user agent. What would
be the limitations (if any)? (10 p)
c) For each of the connections 1–3, explain what application-layer protocol(s) are used for the
mail transfer. (5 p)

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Solution
a) If the outgoing mail server is removed, Alice’s UA needs to contact the incoming mail server
directly in order to send the mail. The incoming mail server may not be able to receive the mail
– it could be busy or otherwise unavailable – and then Alice’s UA cannot send the mail, and has
to wait until the incoming mail server becomes available. Hence, the outgoing mail server
offloads Alice’s UA by queuing messages waiting to be sent.
(An outgoing mail server is also important for controlling the sending of mail from an
organization. It can control what clients are allowed to send mail as a way to prevent abuse,
spam for instance. This is not a required part of the solutions, though, so there is no reduction in points for
not mentioning this.)
b) The incoming mail server stores Bob’s mail, and Bob can access the mail whenever he wants. If
the server is removed, Bob has to be online in order to receive mail. (It also means that Bob
will store all mail on his computer, so he cannot access his mail from another computer. (No
reduction in points for not mentioning this.)
1: SMTP. 2: SMTP. 3: POP or IMAP (HTTP is also a valid answer, if the UA is web-based).

4. DNS (25 p)
You use the “dig” lookup tool to get the IP address of KTH’s web server “www.kth.se”. You want
to try different name servers, so you specify the DNS server as an argument to dig (the server’s IP
address prepended with ‘@’). You run the following three commands:

dig @192.36.135.107 www.kth.se

dig @192.36.148.17 www.kth.se
dig @130.237.72.250 www.kth.se

a) Explain the results: Describe the responses from the three DNS servers. What do the responses
say? We distinguish between four kinds of name servers: root, TLD, authoritative, and local.
You can deduce just from studying the responses what kind of DNS server it is (the flags are
useful here, among other things). For each of the three cases, describe the kind of name server
that is responding to your query. Explain what the response contains. Also, for each name
server, explain whether or not the answer contains the IP address you are looking for. You only
need to discuss the responses at a general level – you should not discuss or describe the details of the messages, the
different fields, their contents, etc. However, you probably need to study the responses carefully in order to be able
to explain them. (15 p)
b) Organizations often have multiple name servers for their domains. What is the purpose of
having multiple name servers? How are they kept synchronized? (5 p)
c) It is sometimes useful to have more than one name in DNS for the same computer. Is it
possible for a computer to have two names under different top-level domains? For example,
one name in the “com.” TLD and one in “se.”. If so, give an example when this might be
useful. (5 p)

Solution

DNS
a) The first response (192.36.135.107) is from a TLD server for the “se” top-level domain. The
response contains the (authoritative) name servers for “kth.se”. The second response is from a
root server, and gives the TLD servers for the “se” top-level domain. The last answer is from
an authoritative server for “kth.se”, and gives the IP address of the web server.
b) Having multiple name servers is for redundancy. When an organization has multiple name
servers, there is one primary server and several secondary servers. The zone file is updated on

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 the primary server, and then the updates are transferred automatically to the secondaries
through “zone transfers”.
c) It is perfectly legal to have names in different top-level domains. A web server for the
“feathers” company could have the names “www.feathers.com” and “www.feathers.se”. When
it gets a request to the name in the “se” domain, it responds with a page in Swedish, otherwise
in English. (Remember that an HTTP request contains the host name in the “Host:” header
field, so the server can examine the header to see what host name was used.)