From: Austin McDonald <austin-mcdonald@...>
Date: 2004-06-08T08:09:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Dropped Connection Problems

I've been looking at this, and I'm curious as to why you're using 
Socket#read rather than BasicSocket#recv or Socket#recvfrom.  Of course, 
when I replace buff = @conn.read(6) with buff=@conn.recv(6), I get an 
IOError during the initialization of the BOS segment; I'm not sure why.  
Have you tried this yet, and if so why did you decide against it?  Any 
idea why I'm having this error?

On the other note, I've got a few months of experience with the OSCAR 
protocol; I spent last summer writing a packet parser for it.  I'd be 
interested in helping you out.

Austin McDonald

Bill Atkins wrote:

>I'm working on a Ruby library to connect to AOL AIM servers with the
>OSCAR protocol.  The client works fine, but after a minute or so the
>server drops my connection.  I don't get any notification about this,
>I just get the following error:
>
>../oscar/flapmgr.rb:28:in `get': undefined method `unpack' for
>nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
>        from ./oscar/snacmgr.rb:61:in `get'
>        from ./oscar/connection.rb:25:in `process'
>        from ./oscar/session.rb:53:in `tick'
>        from ./oscar/session.rb:52:in `each'
>        from ./oscar/session.rb:52:in `tick'
>
>The code in question is:
>
>  class FLAPManager
>    def get
>      buff = @conn.read(6)
>      header = buff.unpack("CCnn")
>
>      ...
>    end
>
>When the connection is dropped, Socket#read just returns nil.  Why is
>this?  Is there any way to have an exception raised when a server
>drops a connection.  When a client breaks a connection to a server,
>the server gets an exception, so I don't see why this wouldn't be
>possible.
>
>On another note, if anyone out there has any experience with the OSCAR
>protocol, I would greatly appreciate any assistance you could give me.
> The source is available in CVS at
>http://rubyforge.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/cgi/viewcvs.cgi/oscar/?cvsroot=oscar
>..  Everything works _perfectly_ until the server suddenly drops my
>connection.  I'd really like some help with this.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Bill Atkins
>
>
>  
>