All articles tagged #tcp

SSH is yet another example of an ancient technology that is still in wide use today. It may very well be that learning a couple of SSH tricks is more profitable in the long run than mastering a dozen Cloud Native tools destined to become deprecated next quarter.

One of my favorite parts of this technology is SSH Tunnels. With nothing but standard tools and often using just a single command, you can achieve the following:

• Access internal VPC endpoints through a public-facing EC2 instance.
• Open a port from the localhost of a development VM in the host's browser.
• Expose any local server from a home/private network to the outside world.

And more 😍

But despite the fact that I use SSH Tunnels daily, it always takes me a while to figure out the right command. Should it be a Local or a Remote tunnel? What are the flags? Is it a local_port:remote_port or the other way around? So, I decided to finally wrap my head around it, and it resulted in a series of labs and a visual cheat sheet 🙈

Full version 1.5MB

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These mysterious HTTP 502s happened to me already twice over the past few years. Since the amount of service-to-service communications every year goes only up, I expect more and more people to experience the same issue. So, sharing it here.

TL;DR: HTTP Keep-Alive between a reverse proxy and an upstream server combined with some misfortunate downstream- and upstream-side timeout settings can make clients receiving HTTP 502s from the proxy.

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Go standard library makes it super easy to start an HTTP server:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        w.Write([]byte("Hello there!\n"))
    })

    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

...or send an HTTP request:

package main

import "net/http"

func main() {
    resp, err := http.Get("http://example.com/")
    body, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
}

In just ~10 lines of code, I can get a server up and running or fetch a real web page! In contrast, creating a basic HTTP server in C would take hundreds of lines, and anything beyond basics would require third-party libraries.

The Go snippets from above are so short because they rely on powerful high-level abstractions of the net and net/http packages. Go pragmatically chooses to optimize for frequently used scenarios, and its standard library hides many internal socket details behind these abstractions, making lots of default choices on the way. And that's very handy, but...

What if I need to fine-tune net/http sockets before initiating the communication? For instance, how can I set some socket options like SO_REUSEPORT or TCP_QUICKACK?

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What is a web server?

Let's start by answering the question: What is a web server?

First off, it's a server (no pun intended). A server is a process [sic] serving clients. Surprisingly or not, a server has nothing to do with hardware. It's just a regular piece of software run by an operating system. Like most other programs around, a server gets some data on its input, transforms data in accordance with some business logic, and then produces some output data. In the case of a web server, the input and output happen over the network via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). For a web server, the input consists of HTTP requests from its clients - web browsers, mobile applications, IoT devices, or even other web services. And the output consists of HTTP responses, oftentimes in form of HTML pages, but other formats are also supported.

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