From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2006-03-29T18:53:42+09:00
Subject: Re: how to build a daemon

Dominik Werder wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> While building a little network daemon I stumbled upon the following issue:
> 
> I have no idea how much data I can read without blocking. So an attacker
> could simply ignore the protocol and stop the transfer so that my daemon
> blocks forever..
> How do you avoid this simple issue? The only method I found is setting a
> Timeout::timeout 10 do end  around the code, but this requires the
> timeout module and I don't know if this works reliable..

You'd typically have a thread that handles a connection.  So the worst 
case is that a single thread blocks om IO but this does not block the 
whole process.  You're only out of luck if Ruby is stuck in some long 
running call into an external C lib (can be a system call or whatever) 
because it doesn't support native threads (yet).

Kind regards

	robert