broadcast (udp) socket - multi processes
 

hi all
I am currently working on an application that spawns several other processes and on all of them I have a udp socket listening for either broadcast messages or direct messages.
I have created a small protocol such that I can address each running process (simple identification) on the same host, so I can either broadcast some messages or send directly to the host. All messages are received by the socket on each processes running on the host but only the ones that have registered for the incoming message will further process the message.

Hope that is quite clear what I'm trying to explain here.

The problem is that when I use direct IP addresses (192.168.10.10 instead of 192.168.10.255) the message is not being received to all sockets on the the running processes.
For example:

- Process A spawns -> B
- When a message targeted both for A and B is being sent using direct IP, only the B process receives the message on the udp socket.
- When a message is being sent using broadcast IP all processes are receiving the message on the udp socket.

The sockets are configured using setsockopt() with both SO_REUSEADDR and SO_BROADCAST.

Hope you can assist me in this or give me some hints on where the problem might be.

regards
Marri

It seems so that the last process being spawned always gets the attention of the socket. Is it so that ports can't be shared when using unicast and only in broadcast cases the ports can be shared?
Is there any way around this other then implementing multicast sockets?

regards
Einar