[ciapug] TCP devel

[David Champion]

Ryan O'Rourke wrote:

>First off, I'd like to introduce myself since I'm new to this list -
>although I probably know many of you from such lists as cialug or
>amesfug :-)
>I'm a network and sysadmin for a small retail chain in Ames. I don't do
>any development yet, but I try to pick things up and try to help our
>developer as much as possible. Our entire operation is in the process of
>making the transition from MS to Linux and Open Source. This creates
>some, shall we call them, "learning opportunities" for our developer as
>he is very new to such concepts as Perl, PHP, MySQL, etc.
>I appreciate your help as we all learn! Please bear with me as I try to
>explain our problems in layman's terms.
>Oh, and one other note, if any of you ever see any code that creates a
>security concern or is just plain stupid please speak up! You won't
>offend anyone here!
>
>Anyway, we're trying to do some credit authorization type transactions
>where we send data across a TCP port, wait for a reply, process that
>reply, and continue the communication back and forth. 
>Apparently, we can send data, but when the response comes back our
>script hangs and the socket does not close.
>We're using:
>RedHat AS 2.1
>PHP 4.1.2-2.1.6 (newest version available in RPM format for RH EL)
>Apache 1.3.23-10 
>
>The code:
>$length = strlen($output);
>$hexlength = dechex($length);
>$hexlength1 = "\x95";
>$header = "\x02\x46\x44\x02\x00$hexlength1";
>$footer = "\x03\x46\x44\x03";
>$header .= "$output$footer";
>$output = "$header";
>
>
>$host = "206.201.XXX.XXX";
>$port = XXXXX;
>
>//Open a client connection
>$fp = fsockopen($host, $port, $errno, $errstr);
>
>if (!$fp){
>$result = "Error: Could not open socket connection";
>}else{
>//Write the user string to the socket
>fputs ($fp, $output, strlen($output));
>//get the result
>while(!eof($fp))
>{
>$result .= fgets($fp, 1024);
>}
>//close the connection
>fclose($fp);
>}
>
>
>I should also add that our developer is pushing me to upgrade to PHP 4.3
>since it supports streams - http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.stream.php
>He thinks no support for streams is the root of the problem here. I
>don't want to upgrade to PHP 4.3 since that will mean using an
>unsupported version on a box where we're paying $1,500/yr for support.
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>  
>

What system are you using that doesn't offer an update to PHP 4.3.x?

I would suggest putting PHP 4.3.x on a test box, and see if using 
streams fixes your problem. If it does... then it's probably worth updating.

-dc