XPA ChangeLog

This ChangeLog covers the XPA 2 implementation. It will be updated as we continue to develop and improve XPA. The up-to-date version can be found here.

Public Release 2.1.15 (July 23, 2013)

• Added support for large data transfers

• XPAGet and XPASet now pass size_t instead of int for lengths

• Send and receive callbacks now pass size_t instead of int for lengths

• Port to mingw (Windows)

Public Release 2.1.14 (June 7, 2012)

• Fixed several memory leaks in the Tcl wrappers (tcl.c).

• Use Tcl stubs library for linking shared Tcl, if available.

Public Release 2.1.13 (April 14, 2011)

• An atexit handler is no longer installed automatically (it crashes Tcl 8.5.8 applications). Call XPAAtExit(void) to install the handler.

• Removed permission checking from Find() on cygwin systems. This was broken by Windows 7.

• Removed addition of -no-cpp-precomp flag from gcc 4.2 and beyond (Mac).

Public Release 2.1.12 (January 26, 2010)

• Added XPA_HOST environment variable to allow users to specify the hostname (and hence, ip) component of the INET method id. This is useful, for example, if you want to register an access point using a VPN-generated IP instead of the canonical IP.

• Fix typo in Tcl binding to xpainfo causing a crash after 2 invocations.

Public Release 2.1.11 (December 7, 2009)

• Generalized XPANSKeepAlive() to send messages to xpans, proxy xpans, or both. The default is to send just to proxies (e.g. chandra-ed).

• Changed XPANSKeepAlive() to send an in-band new-line char to xpans, changed xpans to handle an in-band new-line as a keep-alive message. Necessitated by Cisco routers that clear the URG flag in a TCP packet, breaking OOB data transfer for the whole Internet, as well as the OOB-based keep-alive implemented in xpans.

• In xpans, print warning when the keep-alive option switch is used.

• Port to mingw (thanks to B.Schoenhammer)

• Change OOB character sent by xpans keepalive to a space, trying to working around cisco routers that force OOB data into the inbound stream.

• fix gcc fprintf warning in xpans.c

Public Release 2.1.10 (September 1, 2009)

• Update mklib and configure.ac to support 64-bit builds on Macs.

• Fixed bug in XPAAccess() in which the returned names could have an extra (bogus) character when the target is an explicit ip:port or local socket file.

• Add setjmp/longjmp support to xalloc.

• Add XPASaveJmp(void *env) as a high-level interface to xalloc_savejmp();

Internal Release 2.1.9

• Fixed a bug that prevented an access point starting with a number from being recognized peoperly. NB: a pure number still signifies a port on the current machine. Also num:num signifies ip:port, where ip can be a pure hex value or the canonical form vvv.xxx.yyy.zzz.

• Modified internal Launch() routine to use posix_spawn(), if necessary. This is required for OS X 10.5 (leopard), which frowns upon use of fork() and exec(). Also modified zprocess routines to use Launch().

• Added XPASetFree(xpa, void (*myfree)(void *)) routine to allow callbacks to specify a free routine other than malloc free (e.g. Perl garbage collection).

• XPACmdAdd() now checks to ensure that it was passed an XPA struct created by XPACmdNew().

• Change launch.h to xlaunch.h to avoid conflict with OS X.

Public Release 2.1.8 (1 November 2007)

• A public release to complete current XPA development work.

Patch Release 2.1.7b[1,2] (Feb 22, 2006; March 8, 2007)

• Added a convenience null to the end of the buffers returned by XPAGet.

• Added code to avoid calling atexit routine if a fork'ed child calls exit() instead of _exit().

• Added XPA_CLIENT_DOXPA environment variable to turn off client processing of xpa server requests.

• Added --version to xpaset, xpaget, xpainfo, xpaaccess, xpans to display XPA version and exit.

• Added support for integrating XPA into a Gtk loop.

• xpaaccess now returns its answer in the error code as well as to stdout (without the -n switch, it returns 1 for a match, with the -n switch, the number of matches is returned).

• Fixed bug which prevented xpans from being started up automatically by an xpa server if its pathname contained a space character.

• Fixed bug in MINGW port of xpans in which an XPA server that terminated via an interrupt was not being properly removed from the list of registered access points.

• Added XPA_LOGNAME to override LOGNAME when registering username

• Upgraded swish-e indexing code to 2.4.5.

Patch Release 2.1.6 (4 May 2005)

• Added -P switch to xpans to enable experimental proxy support (default is disabled). An argument of 1 processes proxy requests in the same thread as xpans requests, while an argument of 2 processes proxy requests in a separate thread. (The latter is recommended to avoid xpans timeouts, since xpa callback processing can take a long time.)

• Added ability to build shared libraries (done automatically with configure --enable-shared) with compilers other than gcc.

• Made yet another attempt to build shared libraries under OS X.

• Fixed a server bug in Tcl support under Windows (introduced early in 2.1.6) which caused an occasional SEGV.

• Fixed race condition in cases where 2 or more servers makes client calls to one another.

• Fixed bug in the XPA handler routine in which an access point was turned off if an error occurred in that routine (as opposed to the user-defined callback routine).

• Fixed race condition when "ack=false" flag (or -n) is used with XPASet() (or xpaset).

• Added defensive code to XPA handler to ensure that the passed XPA record is valid.

• Tcl/XPA servers such as ds9 were not turning off select() on the xpa channels inside an xpa callback, as required. This is now fixed.

• Added timestamps to most server and client error messages if the XPA_TIMESTAMP_ERRORS variable is set. This is useful when XPA errors are being logged in an error log (e.g. Web/CGI use).

• Generated PostScript and PDF versions of the help pages.

• Moved OPTIONS section before (often-lengthy) DESCRIPTION section in man pages.

• All memory allocation now performs error checking on the result.

• Removed some compiler warnings that surfaced when using gcc -O2.

• Updated configure.ac to better support Tcl in Panther with Apple Frameworks.

Patch Release 2.1.5 (12 January 2004)

• Fixed bug in XPAPoll(). Erroneously, no requests were being processed when maxreq==0. Now, all pending events are processed, as per the documentation.

• Added ack=false to XPAInfo() (and corresponding -n to xpainfo) so that client does not wait for a response from the server. This is essential in cases where XPA servers wish to send info messages to one another without causing a race condition.

• Generated man pages from the html pages. These are installed automatically at build time.

• The xpans program with Unix sockets now uses a lock file to signal that it is running, in order to avoid a potential (but rare) race condition at startup.

• Code that calls Unix-type bind() now manipulate umask() to ensure that all users have write permissions to the socket file (OS X apparently uses these permissions while previous platforms ignore them).

• Configure now checks for socklen_t type (OS X does not define it).

• Added an atexit function to run XPAFree. The aim here is to delete Unix socket files on exiting.

• Under Windows, the Tcl event-handling code now blocks for 1/1000 of a second instead of not blocking at all (which inadvertently used 100% of cpu).

• Upgraded Tcl/Tk support to 8.4.

• Made another round of checks was made through all instances of strcat, strcpy, etc. to look for potential buffer overflows. Changed all instances of sprintf() to snprintf().

• Class and name designators are now limited to 1024 characters, for no particular reason.

• The obsolete $SAORD_BIN variable was being added to the path when searching for xpans. This is no longer the case.

• Fixed non-ANSI compiler errors in both xpa.c and xpans.c.

• Fixed minor problems to support compilation with g++.

• Ported to Intel icc and gcc 3.3 compilers.

• Upgraded autoconf to 2.57. Included in this upgrade is a change that makes gcc the default compiler (use "configure CC=cc" to change this). Also, by default, the Tcl shared object is no longer automatically built if the Tcl libraries are used. Use the --enable-tclshlib switch in configure to enable this feature.

• Changed license from public domain to GNU GPL.

Patch Release 2.1.4 (24 March 2003)

• Made inet method unique, even when hosts are behind a firewall using the same ports (on different local machines).

• The initial connection from an xpa server to a local xpans now is controlled by a timeout (default 5 sec, controlled by XPA_CONNECT_TIMEOUT variable). This should prevent a hang on connect() if the network is not set up correctly.

• Fixed rare race condition when an XPA server callback performed its own XPAGet or XPASet call to another XPA server.

• Use POSIX O_NONBLOCK for non-blocking I/O in fcntl call if it exists, instead of O_NDELAY.

Patch Release 2.1.3 (26 September 2002)

• Added -k [sec] switch to xpans to support sending one-byte keepalive messages from xpans to registered xpa servers.

• Added XPANSKeepAlive routine (and Tcl equivalent) to allow xpa servers to send a one-byte keepalive message to xpans.

Patch Release 2.1.2 (18 July 2002)

• The "-help" reserved command now also displays the XPA version, if no explicit sub-commands are specified.

• Change internal state of xpans proxy to save ip:port value of a server behind a NAT firewall. This is required to give some hope of distinguishing multiple instances of ds9 running behind NAT.

Patch Release 2.1.1 (20 June 2002)

• Added a version check between xpans and an access point, performed when it gets registered by an XPA server. If the server has a version greater than the xpans version, a warning is issued by both programs.

• Added a boolean XPA_NSREGISTER environment variable to allow an XPA server to skip xpans registration. The default is to register with the name server. If set to "false", the access point still is set up but it is not registered with an xpans. It can be registered later on (using -remote or -proxy, for example).

• Fixed bug in which xpans was still listening on any interface when XPA_METHOD was localhost (instead of just listening on localhost).

Public Release 2.1.0 (22 April 2002)

New features include:

• Support for proxy access to XPA servers (e.g. ds9) situated behind a firewall (useful for NVO-type applications).

• Improved support for allowing remote machines access rights to the XPA access points (useful for NVO-type applications).

• Ability for XPAAccess() routine and xpaaccess program to contact XPA directly.

• Support for a clipboard access point that allows clients to store ASCII state information in an XPA-enabled server.

• Improved support for Windows platform, as well as new support for Mac OSX.

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (2 April 2002)

• Removed the environment variable generated by each XPA access point (of the form XPA_name=method). The putenv() call was causing ds9 to crash under both Linux and LinuxPPC during a socket operation. We suspect a bug in putenv but cannot prove it and this feature is not essential, so ...

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (1 April 2002)

• Fixed an uninitialized variable in xpamb which prevented it from working at all on some systems.

• Changed xpamb switch from "-add" to "-data" (to store named data).

• Changed how xpamb works with xpaget so that xpamb can return data from XPA access points as well as from stored data. (Previous versions only returned stored data.) Now, you can retrieve stored data explicitly using the -info and/or -data switches. For example:

    xpaget xpamb -info foo
  

  will return info about the previously stored data named foo. If neither switch is present, then the name is assumed to be an XPA access point.

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (25 March 2002)

• Changed symbol for default port from "*" to "$port" to avoid a syntactical conflict between class:* and machine:* when processing an XPA access point class:name specification. Thus, the default inet method now is '$host:$port' instead of '$host:*'.

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (19 March 2002)

• Removed timeout check when reading data (in clients using xpaget and servers filling the data buffer). We have more and more cases where we need to wait a long time to retrieve data (e.g., slow networks or receiving data being compressed on the fly).

• Moved call to sigaction(SIGCHLD,...) out of XPAOpen(), so that it is only executed when needed by XPAGet()/XPASet() routines called from within xpans/proxy. But then changed logic to use a double fork() instead of sigaction() to prevent zombies (Stevens Adv. Programming p 202).

• Each XPA access point now generates an environment variable of the form XPA_name=method so that children can communicate with the parent access point more easily.

• Added version option to Tcl xparec:

    if [catch { xparec "" version } version] {
      puts "pre-2.1.0e"
    } else {
      puts [split $version .]
    }
  

  to help differentiate between XPA versions within Tcl code.

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (14 February 2002)

• Fixed client handling of out-of-sync messages.

Pre-Release 2.1.0e (11 February 2002)

• Fixed client.c/xopen() so that it does not open an extra socket.

• Fixed xpainfo/xopen() to prevent client from hanging waiting for ack.

• Modified stest to generate xpaaccess points xpa, xpa1, c_xpa, and i_xpa (or more generally, , 1, c_, i) to allow more flexible testing of templates. Also added -a for testing XPAAccess().

Beta Release 2.1.0b10 (31 January 2002)

• Added support for Mac OSX/Darwin to configure file.

Beta Release 2.1.0b9 (26 January 2002)

• Fixed bug in client library that caused XPAAccess() call to hang.

Beta Release 2.1.0b8 (4 January 2002)

• Made modifications to Makefile.in to make releases easier.

• Added instructions to Makefile.in so that xpa.h will always have correct #defines for XPA_VERSION, XPA_MAJOR_VERSION, XPA_MINOR_VERSION, and XPA_PATCH_LEVEL.

Beta Release 2.1.0b7 (21 December 2001)

• Added -proxy switch to -remote sub-command to allow remote access through a firewall, using xpans as a proxy server. The support for proxy processing required a change to the client/server protocol. This means that new xpa servers will not work with old xpa clients (although new xpa clients will work with old xpa servers). For details about proxy firewall support, see http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/inet.html.

• Fixed Tcl support for XPA under Windows/Cygwin by re-writing the code used to add XPA to the Tcl event loop. This fix makes ds9 support for XPA much more stable under Windows.

• Added the shutdown() call to XPA under Cygwin/Windows before closing send() sockets. It appears that a Cygwin recv() socket call does not always sense when the other end closes the socket using close(). This measure must be considered a hack, since the actual problem was never resolved.

• Added code to protect accept() and select() calls from interrupts.

• Extended syntax of the environment variable XPA_NSINET to:

    setenv XPA_NSINET host:port[,port[,port]]
  

  to allow specification of the XPA access point port for xpans, as well as the proxy data port.

• Modified xpans log file so that it contains the xpaset commands required to reconnect with xpa servers.

• xpans now deletes its Unix socket files.

Beta Release 2.1.0b6 (29 October 2001)

• Implemented a reserve public access point named -clipboard so that clients can store ASCII state information on any number of named clipboards. Clipboards of the same name created by clients on different machines are kept separate. The syntax for creating a clipboard is:

    [data] | xpaset [server] -clipboard add|append [clipboard_name]
    xpaset -p [server] -clipboard delete [clipboard_name]
    xpaget [server] -clipboard [clipboard_name]
  

  Use "add" to create a new clipboard or replace the contents of an existing one. Use "append" to append to an existing clipboard.

Beta Release 2.1.0b5 (22 October 2001)

• Use FD_SETSIZE instead of getdtablesize() to determine how many files to check during select();

• Under Cygwin, the launch() routine now uses the Cygwin spawnvp() instead of fork()/exec() where possible (i.e., if no stdfiles are being redirected). This is recommended by Cygwin's (skimpy) on-line documentation and seems to fix the problems ds9 had when starting xpans automatically.

• Added error check to select() call in xpans.

Beta Release 2.1.0b4 (24 September 2001)

• The launch() now can return an error code if the execv() system call fails (something system() does not do).

• INET socket calls between xpa clients and servers now will use localhost if they are on the same machine. This protects against Linux systems where the hostname is hardwired (wrongly) in a DHCP environment.

Beta Release 2.1.0b3 (6 September 2001)

• Modified xpans so that, in the case of a firewall, it tries to correct the specified ip:port by matching against the ip found in the socket packet at accept() time.

• Replaced system() call used to start xpans automatically with a special launch() call, which performs execvp() directly without going through sh. (launch() works under DOS and has fewer security problems.)

• Fixed bug in xpans in which its xpa port was always being set to 14286.

Beta Release 2.1.0b2 (17 August 2001)

• Added support for -remote command, which registers the access point in the XPA name server of the specified remote server, and gives the remote server access rights to the access point. This is used, for example, to give data servers xpa access to ds9 so that data can be sent to ds9 as a result of a CGI-based Web query.

• Reserved commands (except "-help" and "-version") now can only be executed on the machine on which the xpa service is running (not through -remote servers).

• Fixed bug in xpans in which a bad telnet command could hang the program.

• Added -s [security file] to xpans to allow logging of all external connections.

Beta Release 2.1.0b1 (6 August 2001)

• The xpaaccess client program and XPAAccess() client subroutine were modified so that an access-type query can directly contact the xpa servers matching the requested xpa template, instead of just querying the name server for registered access points. This avoid the race condition in which an access point is registered but is not yet available, perhaps because the server has not yet entered its event loop. Note that the calling sequence of the XPAAccess() routine was changed to return all matching access points and their availability status (instead of just returning the number of registered access points). Because of this, we are calling this a minor release instead of a patch.

• Added support for XPA_PORT and XPA_PORTFILE environment variables to allow specification of the port to be used by the command channel (and data channel, if an optional second port is specified) for a given access point.

• Added -m switch to xpaget, xpaset, xpainfo, xpaaccess to allow override of the XPA_METHOD environment variable.

• Changed the default name of the ACL file from xpa.acl to acls.xpa.

• Fixed bug in which it was not possible to send a "set ACL" command to an XPA server which did not have a receive callback (i.e., did not allow xpaset). The xpans program is one such server. It now is possible to set the ACL on xpans.

• We have discovered that Tcl support for datachan and cmdchan is broken under Windows due to an unexplained incompatibility between Cygwin sockets and Win32 sockets. We therefore have removed datachan and cmdchan from the Windows/Tcl support until further notice.

• Extended the behavior of the XPA_DEFACL environment variable so that it can support more than one acl, using a list of semi-colon delimited controls such as: setenv XPA_DEFACL '*:* $host +; *:foo1 otherhost +'.

• Fixed bug in which the class:name specifier "*:*" was erroneously trying to access the xpans name server, instead of accessing all access points.

• Support TMPDIR and TMP environment variables as well as XPA_TMPDIR.

Patch Release 2.0.5 (10 November 2000)

• Added support for Tcl on Windows where there is no select()-based event loop (i.e., where there is no Tcl_CreateFileHandler call in Tcl)

• Minor fixes in Makefile for installing on Windows

• Minor compiler fixes from gcc -Wall.

Patch Release 2.0.4 (20 September 2000)

• Removed extraneous include of varargs.h from find.c.

• Ported to SGI C compiler, which caught lots of unused variables, etc.

• Ported to Cygwin/Windows, which required that we change socket read() and write() calls to recv() and send() respectively. Also had to ensure that we only did socket I/O on sockets (no fileio).

Patch Release 2.0.3 (15 June 2000)

• Fixed the client XPASet() and XPASetFd() calls to handle the specified max number of connections (they were ignoring this argument, leading to memory overwrites).

• Fixed Makefile.in so that CFLAGS and LDFLAGS are not hard-wired values.

• Fixed word.h to load malloc.h and stdlib.h only if they exist.

• Documentation fixes to programs.html (in xpaaccess) and client.html (XPANSLookup).

• Added explicit typecast to strlen() argument to MAX #define in XPAClientStart (strlen() is unsigned in Linux, which can break MAX).

• Removed bogus Imakefile from directory.

• Changed directory name to include patch level (i.e., xpa-2.0.3).

Patch Release 2.0.2 (9 September 1999)

• Fixed server mode (-s) in the xpaset program by properly cleaning up the input buffers (sending commands and data in server mode was broken).

Patch Release 2.0.1 (6 August 1999)

• Fixed the Tcl binding code (tcl.c) for 64-bit machines (Dec Alpha) (erroneously used %x instead of %p when converting pointers to ASCII).

• Got rid of a few compiler warnings on 64-bit machines (a few are unavoidable since we must cast int to void * and back when passing around client data).

Public Release 2.0 (27 May 1999)

• "a new day with no mistakes ... yet"

Index to the XPA Help Pages

Last updated: 22 April 2002