Remote connections, interface to bind to, why not INADDR_ANY?

[Toralf Lund <toralf lund pgs com>]

I'm trying to set up a client-server communication in a real networked 
application via ORBit2. By "real networked application", I mean that the 
client and server may run on different hosts, so I need to enable TCP/IP 
communication. Unfortunately this has proven to be harder than it ought 
to be. Enabling TCP/IP is easy enough - I just pass "-ORBIIOPIPv4=1" to 
CORBA_ORB_init() (I won't bother about IP V6 just yet), the major 
headache is the bind-to-hostname logic.

This thing is, I can't necessarily assume that the server host will have 
complete and consistent network setup where there is always a proper 
hostname whose IP address may be reliably looked up. It will more 
typically get an IP address, but non necessarily name, from a DHCP 
server, and a DNS record matching the address is certainly too much to 
ask for. And of course, since the address is dynamic, having a local 
hosts entry with a real address is a bit problematic...

Anyhow, to get around issues related to hostname lookup etc. I've tried 
using "-ORBNetID=ipaddr", but it seems like quite help in all 
situations, i.e. certain inconsistencies in /etc/hosts or similar may 
still seem like to break the communication.

So, that anyone have any thoughts on this? I mean, I don't expect to get 
a fix for my app unless I provide much more detailed info, but what are 
your experience with IP communication, host lookup issues etc. Also, and 
this is perhaps the key question, why does ORBit2/GIOP insist on binding 
to a specific address in the first place? Why doesn't it just use 
INADDR_ANY? Actually, I've tried to tell it explicitly to do just that, 
via "-ORBIIOPIPName=0.0.0.0", but this lead to problems, too - I got 
"IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0" on remote connections.

- Toralf


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