[Python-Dev] Socket module corner cases

[Bruce Christensen]

Hello,

I'm working on implementing a socket module for IronPython that aims to
be compatible with the standard CPython module documented at
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-socket.html. I have a few questions
about some corner cases that I've found. CPython results below are from
Python 2.4.3 (#69, Mar 29 2006, 17:35:34) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on
win32.

Without further ado, the questions:

 * getfqdn(): The module docs specify that if no FQDN can be found,
socket.getfqdn() should return the hostname as returned by
gethostname(). However, CPython seems to return the passed-in hostname
rather than the local machine's hostname (as would be expected from
gethostname()). What's the correct behavior?
>>> s.getfqdn(' asdlfk asdfsadf ')
'asdlfk asdfsadf'
# expected 'mybox.mydomain.com'

 * getfqdn(): The function seems to not always return the FQDN. For
example, if I run the following code from 'mybox.mydomain.com', I get
strange output. Does getfqdn() remove the common domain between my
hostname and the one that I'm looking up?
>>> socket.getfqdn('otherbox')
'OTHERBOX'
# expected 'otherbox.mydomain.com'
 
 * gethostbyname_ex(): The CPython implementation doesn't seem to
respect the '' == INADDR_ANY and '<broadcast>' == INADDR_BROADCAST
forms. '' is treated as localhost, and '<broadcast>' raises a "host not
found" error. Is this intentional? A quick check seems to reveal that
gethostbyname() is the only function that respects '' and '<broadcast>'.
Are the docs or the implementation wrong?

 * getprotobyname(): Only a few protocols seem to be supported. Why?
>>> for p in [a[8:] for a in dir(socket) if a.startswith('IPPROTO_')]:
...     try:
...             print p,
...             print socket.getprotobyname(p)
...     except socket.error:
...             print "(not handled)"
...
AH (not handled)
DSTOPTS (not handled)
ESP (not handled)
FRAGMENT (not handled)
GGP 3
HOPOPTS (not handled)
ICMP 1
ICMPV6 (not handled)
IDP (not handled)
IGMP (not handled)
IP 0
IPV4 (not handled)
IPV6 (not handled)
MAX (not handled)
ND (not handled)
NONE (not handled)
PUP 12
RAW (not handled)
ROUTING (not handled)
TCP 6
UDP 17

Thanks for your help!

--Bruce