For a good part of the day yesterday, I couldn't figure out why I could send packets to my program from within my computer, but as soon as I tried to send packets to my computer from an external device, I got an ICMP error Destination unreachable (Port unreachable). It was really annoying, because I was following the minimalistic example from the Ruby docs extremely closely.

Long story short, I was using
server.bind(nil, 3804)

when I should have been using
server.bind('<any>', 3804)

Apparently, when you use nil, it doesn't officially bind the socket to that address, but if a packet happens to come by for that port, it will grab it.

Really annoying.

Anyways, just wanted to chronicle the solution that I found, in case by happenstance some other Googler is running into the same issue.

--clint

Congratulations on figuring it out.

quote:

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Originally posted by ssquared:
It's always fun narrowing down on those frustrating little guys. It's not fun going through it, though. Such a small code change makes a HUGE difference.

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Interesting that nil doesn't work in this situation. I shall keep that in mind for the future.

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quote:

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Originally posted by CPUFreak91:
Interesting that nil doesn't work in this situation. I shall keep that in mind for the future.
[/B]

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It slows down working on new APIs when the functions don't report incorrect usage. Often when using incorrect arguments you just get the "unknown" error code.
So I suggest including proper error handling to your programs and libraries...
if host == nil: throw("hey buddy, did you just pass in nil to bind? Sorry we don't accept that. But use 'any' if you are not binding to any specific IP.")

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