Hi,

I observed one instance in my program, where 2nd bind on same ip/port pair became success instead of failure.
I have made below set socket options before bind.

Fun1()
{
..........
fd1 = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, 0);
setsockopt(fd1, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, &optval, sizeof (optval))
then called bind...
}

Fun2()
{
fd2 = socket( AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP );
setsockopt(fd2, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, (char*)&unOptVal, sizeof(unOptVal)))
then called bind.......
}
i am expecting 2nd bind call to be failed, but it became success.
And output of netstat command displays two instances as below

# netstat -apn |grep -i 9897
udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:9897 0.0.0.0:* 5011/abc.vx
udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:9897 0.0.0.0:* 5011/abc.vx

Please help me understanding this behavior, how data from two different sockets are read?

Thanks,
Srik,

SO_REUSEADDR.

Don't do that.

Personally, I don't know WHY this is there, as it allows for significant security problems.

The security problem is that two different users can connect to the same port/address and get each others data.

It is intended to allow a server to rebind to a socket in case the previous server has died and the socket is still open until the timeout occurs... Unfortunately, it also allows OTHER servers to also connect.... and leave security problems in its wake.

A user application/server doing this allows multiple users to connect... and the corresponding security failures happen again.

And yes, I got bit by this - fortunately, local user testing identified the problem so I could remove it before a general release happened.