[THRIFT-1676] As a user of TNonBlockingServer, I want the option to bind to a specific interface to service requests

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.8
• Fix Version/s: 0.11.0
• Component/s: C++ - Library

Environment

Mac OS X. Thrift 0.8.0.

• Assignee: James E. King III
• Reporter: Diwaker Gupta
• Created: 16/Aug/12 17:43
• Updated: 03/Jan/19 13:27
• Resolved: 03/Jan/19 13:27

Description

Thrift doesn't allow users to specify which IP/hostname to use for bind. As a result, a Thrift server usually ends up listening on ALL interfaces on a machine (bind uses INADDR_ANY). This is clearly undesirable in many cases where we may want to restrict connectivity to localhost or to within a particular subnet or targeted towards a specific host or IP.

Here's a example of what TNonblockingServer does:

// Wildcard address
  error = getaddrinfo(NULL, port, &hints, &res0);
  if (error) {
    throw TException("TNonblockingServer::serve() getaddrinfo " +
                     string(gai_strerror(error)));
  }

  // Pick the ipv6 address first since ipv4 addresses can be mapped
  // into ipv6 space.
  for (res = res0; res; res = res->ai_next) {
    if (res->ai_family == AF_INET6 || res->ai_next == NULL)
      break;
  }

As can be seen, the above code fragment provides NULL as the first param to getaddrinfo and always specifies AI_PASSIVE. This results in the behavior I described above.

A better approach IMO is to provide the following interface instead:

TServer::serve(const char* hostOrIp, int port)

This is consistent with what other modern server frameworks do (node.js, netty etc.)

Issue Links

• duplicates: THRIFT-1508 TServerSocket does not allow for the user to specify the IP address to bind to
• duplicates: THRIFT-1025 C++ ServerSocket should inherit from Socket with the necessary Ctor to listen on connections from a specific host (similar to perl library)