IK2218 Protocols and Principles of the Internet

EP2120 Internetworking
Homework 3

Solutions due: 20:00, September 30, 2020

Review due: 20:00, October 3, 2020

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1. Socket API (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, ...);
while (true) {
t = recv(s, ...);
if (fork() == 0) {
ProcessRequest(...);
send(t, ...);
close(t);
exit();
}
}

(a) Is the sample code for a client or server? Does it use TCP or UDP? Explain your (5 p)
answer.
(b) The textbook gives two examples of communication using the socket interface: (5 p)
1) connection-oriented, concurrent communication, and 2) connectionless, iterative
communication. Characterize the communication in the sample code using the
same terminology.
(c) In practice, this kind of communication is not frequently used. Give an explanation (5 p)
why the designer of this particular application still may have decided to use it.

Solution:
(a) It is a server (since it calls bind, and receives data before it sends). There is
no calls to listen() or accept(), which are mandatory for a TCP server. Hence,
it is a UDP server.
(b) Connection-less, concurrent communication. (The concurrency comes from the
fact that a child process is created through fork() for each message received.)
(c) Presumably it takes a considerable amount of time to process each message.
By creating a new process for each received message, the server does not need
to wait for one message to be processed before it can deal with the the next.
Hence, it seems that the application has requirments on how long time it may
take to process a message from a client.
Grading notes: the answer should demonstrate an understanding of the rea-
sons for chosing a concurrent design, namely that there is a need to process
several messages concurrently. If the solution does not indicate such an un-
derstanding, zero points should be awarded.)

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

GET /feathers/swordfish.html HTTP/1.1

Host: www.duck.org
Connection: keep-alive
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)
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8

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 (a) Which web document does the browser request? Answer by giving the URL. The (5 p)
answer should be a complete and correct URL.
(b) Describe the TCP connection policy that the client requests. (2 p)
(c) The server gives the following response: (3 p)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2020 12:34:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Content-Length: 286
Cache-control: public, max-age=600
Keep-Alive: timeout=8, max=120
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

more data...
Describe the TCP connection policy with which the server responds.
(d) Is the returned object cacheable? If so, describe how it may be cached. (5 p)
(e) Assume that the web object that the client fetches is an HTML file that references (15 p)
four other web objects (which do not, in turn, use any further web objects).
The browser can use two different strategies to speed up loading the page: 1) mul-
tiple non-persistent connections in parallel, and 2) a single persistent connection
with pipelining. For each of the two cases, find the time it takes from that the user
clicks on the link until the web page can be presented on the screen. That is, the
total time it takes to fetch all objects that are needed for the page.
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).
(f) Page load time is important on the web, but it is not the only thing that matters. (5 p)
Not considering page load time performance, give two advantages of persistent
connections over non-persistent connections.

Solution:
(a) http://www.duck.org/feathers/swordfish.html The answer needs to be exactly
like this for full score, with two exceptions: no deduction in points for answer-
ing with https instead of http, or for including port 80 in the URL.
(b) The client requests a persistent connection – that the TCP connection should
be kept open so that it can be reused for several HTTP request/response
transactions.
(c) The server agrees to a persistent connections, which may be used for 120
requests at the most, and with a connection lifetime of 8 seconds. The exact
meaning of the timeout parameter is that it is the minimum amount of time
that an idle connection has to remain open. However, that level of detail is not
required in the answer. It is sufficient that the answer demonstrates a basic
understanding that the timeout parameter controls connection lifetime.
(d) Yes, the object is cacheable, both by browsers and proxies (that is what “pub-
lic” means). The object may be cached for 600 seconds at the most. Both
aspects – where and for how long – need to be considered for full score.
(e) 1) 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.

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 2) 3 × RT T . 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.
(f) • Each connection uses system resources (memory, CPU, etc). So an ad-
vantage with the persistent connection strategy is that it uses less system
resources.
• TCP congestion control is more effective with long-lived TCP connections
than with short-lived connections.
• A long-lived connection has time to grow a larger transmission window,
so transfers over persistent connections are more efficient.
A solution should mention two advantages. These are probably the main ad-
vantages, but there could be other. However, a claimed advantage has to be
relevant and significant in order to render any points.

3. Email (25 p)
Internet email consists of several components that have different functions. Consider
the case when Alice wants to send an email to Bob. The email will be transferred in
two steps, via two different mail servers, before Bob gets the mail.
(a) What are the two mail servers? Describe their main functions. (5 p)
(b) For each of the two transfers, explain what protocols are used, both at the appli- (5 p)
cation layer and at the transport layer.
(c) For each of the two transfers, explain what party is client and what party is server, (15 p)
and how the client gets the location (the domain name) of the server. Be specific
when you describe how the domain names are obtained.

Solution:
(a) Alice’s outgoing mail server and Bob’s incoming mail server.
(b) Both transfers use SMTP over TCP.

(c) The first transfer is from Alice’s mail program (client) to Alice’s outgoing mail
server (server). Alice’s mail program is configured with the domain name for
the outgoing mail server. The second transfer is from Alice’s outgoing mail
server (client) to Bob’s incoming mail server (server). Alice’s outgoing mail
server gets the domain name of Bob’s incoming mail server by doing a DNS
lookup for the MX record for the domain part of Bob’s email address (the part
after the “@” sign).

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 @193.0.14.129 www.kth.se

dig @213.108.25.4 www.kth.se
dig @130.235.20.5 www.kth.se
dig @130.237.72.200 www.kth.se
(a) Explain the results: Describe the responses from the four DNS servers. What do (20 p)
the responses say?

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 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 four 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.
(b) DNS uses UDP, not TCP. Unlike TCP, UDP does not guarantee delivery of data. (5 p)
What happens if a DNS message (query or response) is lost? Is it a problem, and
if so, how is it handled?

Solution:
(a) 1. The first query (193.0.14.129) is to a root server, and gives the TLD
servers for the “se” top-level domain.
2. The second query (213.108.25.4) is to a TLD server for the “se” top-
level domain. The response contains the (authoritative) name servers for
“kth.se”.
3. The third query (130.235.20.5) is to an authoritative server for “kth.se”,
and gives the IP address of the web server.
4. The fourth query (130.237.72.200) is to a resolver, and gives the IP addess
of the web server.
One way to distinguish the last two cases is that the authoritative name server
does not offer recursion, while the resolver does.
(b) The DNS client has a timer. If it does not receive a response before the timer
expires, the client retransmits the query.

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