It’s my second post since the programme started and I have to say that I’m very excited about how things are going, we’ve learned a lot about our project and I think the way we approach new problems shows that.
Since my first post I’ve been working on a diagnostic tool, a transport layer ping meant to reach a server over the tcp/ssl protocol and give relevant information about the connection status to the user (reached, timed out, etc). I had a slow start, I didn’t even know how to begin, where from or how this feature should work, but I kept learning, documenting and with the help of our mentor and the community I’ve almost finished it.
I’m gonna present you a basic use-case, which I also received it from Patrick, the module owner, to understand better how this feature works:
Firefox says “cannot reach server https://foo.com“; I wonder why that is?
Troubleshooting:
- Can I change foo.com to an IP address? (DNS lookup, Catalin is working on it)
- Can I connect to IP address port 443?(TCP ping)If not, why not?(refused, timed out)
- Can I handshake with SSL on port 443? If not, why not? (bad SSL version, invalid certificate, timed out, etc)
I started with actually doing the connect and reporting whether it worked or not and I recently finished to implement some timeouts for those connections whose status is never “reached”, so now the user can set a timespan before the connection is declared “timed out”. I’m currently facing a problem with mapping some error codes to localized strings. A method has a behaviour I haven’t expected so I’m now waiting for an answer from someone who already worked with that interface.
That’s all about how my work was going, I hope to find a solution for this problem until tomorrow.
See you next post!