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In order to reach a peer, a process must know its :term:`address`. An address is a value that identifies a peer in a given network. There exists many different kinds of address families. For example, some of them allow reaching a peer using the file system on the computer. Some others enable communicating with a remote peer through a network. The socket API provides generic functions: the peer address is taken as a ``struct sockaddr *``, which can point to any family of address. This is partly why sockets are a powerful abstraction.
The ``sendto`` system call allows to send data to a peer identified by its socket address through a given socket.
The first argument is the file descriptor of the socket that we use to perform the communication. ``buf`` is a buffer of length ``len`` containing the bytes to send to the peer. The usage of ``flags`` argument is out of the scope of this section and can be set to 0. ``dest_addr`` is the socket address of the destination to which we want to send the bytes, its length is passed using the ``addrlen`` argument.
In the following example, a C program is sending the bytes ``'h'``, ``'e'``, ``'l'``, ``'l'`` and ``'o'`` to a remote process located at address ``peer_addr``, using the already created socket ``sock``.
As the ``sendto`` function is generic, this function will work correctly independently from the fact that the peer's address is defined as a path on the computer filesystem or a network address.
Receiving data from a peer using a socket
Operating systems allow assigning an address to a socket using the ``bind`` system call. This is useful when you want to receive messages from another program to which you announced your socket address. Once the address is assigned to the socket, the program can receive data from others using system calls such as ``recv`` and ``read``. Note that we can use the ``read`` system call as the operating system provides a socket as a file descriptor.
The following program binds its socket to a given socket address and then waits for receiving new bytes, using the already created socket ``sock``.
Depending on the socket address family, the operating system might implicitly assign an address to an unbound socket upon a call to ``write``, ``send`` or ``sendto``. While this is a useful behavior, describing it precisely is out of the scope of this section.
While the provided examples show the usage of a `char` array as the data buffer, implementers should **never** assume that it contains a string. C programs rely on the `char` type to refer to a 8-bit long value, and arbitrary binary values can be exchanged over the network (i.e., the ``\0`` value does not delimit the end of the data).
Using this code, the program will read and print an arbitrary message received from an arbitrary peer who knows the program's socket address. If we want to know the address of the peer that sent us the message, we can use the ``recvfrom`` system call. This is what a modified version of ``bind_and_receive_from_peer`` is doing below.
This function is now using the ``recvfrom`` system call that will also provide the address of the peer who sent the message. As addresses are generic and can have different sizes, ``recvfrom`` also tells us the size of the address that it has written.
``connect``: connecting a socket to a remote address
Operating systems enable linking a socket to a remote address so that every information sent through the socket will only be sent to this remote address, and the socket will only receive messages sent by this remote address. This can be done using the ``connect`` system call shown below.
This system call will assign the socket ``sockfd`` to the ``addr`` remote socket address. The process can then use the ``send`` and ``write`` system calls that do not to specify the destination socket address. Furthermore, the calls to ``recv`` and ``read`` will only deliver messages sent by this remote address. This is useful when we only care about the other peer messages.
The following program connects a socket to a remote address, sends a message and waits for a reply.
Creating a new socket to communicate through a network
Until now, we learned how to use sockets that were already created. When writing a whole program, you will have to create you own sockets and choose the concrete technology that it will use to communicate with others. In this section, we will create new sockets and allow a program to communicate with processes located on another computer using a network. The most recent standardized technology used to communicate through a network is the :term:`IPv6` network protocol. In the IPv6 protocol, hosts are identified using *IPv6 addresses*. Modern operating systems allow IPv6 network communications between programs to be done using the socket API, just as we did in the previous sections.
A program can use the ``socket`` system call to create a new socket.
The ``domain`` parameter specifies the address family that we will use to concretely perform the communication. For an IPv6 socket, the ``domain`` parameter will be set to the value ``AF_INET6``, telling the operating system that we plan to communicate using IPv6 addresses. The ``type`` parameter specifies the communication guarantees that we need. For now, we will use the type ``SOCK_DGRAM`` which allows us to send *unreliable messages*. This means that each data that we send at each call of ``sendto`` will either be completely received or not received at all. The last parameter will be set to ``0``. The following line creates a socket, telling the operating system that we want to communicate using IPv6 addresses and that we want to send unreliable messages.
Sending a message to a remote peer using its IPv6 address
Now that we created an IPv6 socket, we can use it to reach another program if we know its IPv6 address. IPv6 addresses have a human-readable format that can be represented as a string of characters. The details of IPv6 addresses are out of scope of this section but here are some examples :
The ``::1`` IPv6 address identifies the computer on which the current program is running.
The ``2001:6a8:308f:9:0:82ff:fe68:e520`` IPv6 address identifies the computer serving the ``https://beta.computer-networking.info`` website.
An IPv6 address often identifies a computer and not a program running on the computer. In order to identify a specific program running on a specific computer, we use a *port number* in addition to the IPv6 address. A program using an IPv6 socket is this identified using :
The IPv6 address of the computer
The port number identifying the program running on the computer
A program can use the ``struct sockaddr_in6`` to represent IPv6 socket addresses. The following program creates a ``struct sockaddr_in6`` that identifies the program that reserved the port number ``55555`` on the computer identified by the ``::1`` IPv6 address.
Now, we have built everything we need to send a message to the remote program. The ``create_socket_and_send_message`` function below assembles all the building blocks we created until now in order to send the message ``"hello"`` to the program running on port ``55555`` on the computer identified by the ``::1`` IPv6 address.
Note that we can reuse our ``send_hello_to_peer`` function without any modification as we wrote it to handle any kind of sockets, including sockets using the IPv6 network protocol.
Endianness: exchanging integers between different computers

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locale/pot/exercises/sockets.pot, string 26