libtcp++ 0.1.2 review

libtcp++ is a C++ class library to facilitate the creation of TCP/IP clients and servers

License: Freeware File size: 67K Developer: Sasha Pachev

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libtcp++ is a C++ class library to facilitate the creation of TCP/IP clients and servers. libtcp++ has three classes, TcpClient, TcpServer and TcpIpRuleSet.

TcpServer has build it logging capability peer detection method, and IP-based access control in addition to regular server functionality.

TcpClient supports a user specified timeout on connect(), nice for port/host scanning, and other situations when you may be connecting to a dead host or a firewalled port.

Requirements:
a C++ compiler on a Unix platform with STL support to the exent of GCC 2.7,
a reasonably recent version GCC itself is the best compiler to compile it on.
The library will cleanly compile on Linux and BSD with g++. Other configurations have not yet been tested. You may need to change a few lines to make it work on another platform/compiler. Please let me know what you did to make it work in that case.

Installation:

gunzip -c libtcp++*.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd libtcp++-*
./configure
make
su
make install

Usage:

#include
#include

to link use -ltcp++

The use of the client should be pretty obvious from the header file and the test example in tcp_client.cc

The same applies to the server (see tcp_server.cc ), but one thing requires explanation:

to write your own server, inherit from TcpServer and implement handle_client(int sock_fd)
the server will listen on the port specified in the constructor and fork when connection is made calling your implementation of handle_client() see source for more details

To use IP access control, after instantiating TcpServer call add_ip_rule(netnum, netmask) of each rule. Use netmask of 255.255.255.255 for a single host, and its IP for netnum. Both netnum and netmask are C string representations of IP addresses/masks, not the 4-byte arrays. They will be parsed by inet_aton().

After setting up all the rules with add_ip_rule(), activate them with enable_access_control(). After you have called enable_access_control() all connections will be denied except those coming from host that match one of the rules you have added. You can disable it with disable_access_control()