5.14 Crashing of Server Host
This scenario will test to see what happens when the server host crashes. To simulate this, we must run the client and server on different hosts. We then start the server, start the client, type in a line to the client to verify that the connection is up, disconnect the server host from the network, and type in another line at the client. This also covers the scenario of the server host being unreachable when the client sends data (i.e., some intermediate router goes down after the connection has been established).
The following steps take place:
When the server host crashes, nothing is sent out on the existing network connections. That is, we are assuming the host crashes and is not shut down by an operator (which we will cover in Section 5.16).
We type a line of input to the client, it is written by writen (Figure 5.5), and is sent by the client TCP as a data segment. The client then blocks in the call to readline, waiting for the echoed reply.
If we watch the network with tcpdump, we will see the client TCP continually retransmitting the data segment, trying to receive an ACK from the server. Section 25.11 of TCPv2 shows a typical pattern for TCP retransmissions: Berkeley-derived implementations retransmit the data segment 12 times, waiting for around 9 minutes before giving up. When the client TCP finally gives up (assuming the server host has not been rebooted during this time, or if the server host has not crashed but was unreachable on the network, assuming the host was still unreachable), an error is returned to the client process. Since the client is blocked in the call to readline, it returns an error. Assuming the server host crashed and there were no responses at all to the client's data segments, the error is ETIMEDOUT. But if some intermediate router determined that the server host was unreachable and responded with an ICMP "destination unreachable' message, the error is either EHOSTUNREACH or ENETUNREACH.
Although our client discovers (eventually) that the peer is down or unreachable, there are times when we want to detect this quicker than having to wait nine minutes. The solution is to place a timeout on the call to readline, which we will discuss in Section 14.2.
The scenario that we just discussed detects that the server host has crashed only when we send data to that host. If we want to detect the crashing of the server host even if we are not actively sending it data, another technique is required. We will discuss the SO_KEEPALIVE socket option in Section 7.5.
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