Hey folks

Another question from me (and a big thanks to grif for helping me with the last one – working perfectly now, so much obliged)

OK – like I said in my last post, I was working with a test switch which was running on my local network with IP address 192.168.10.71 going through the default port of 8002 (apparently)

However, now I’m trying to roll out the finished product to the client, and they have furnished me with the public IP of their Insteon EZServe switch. I know that the IP address/port is correct, as I am able to browse to it and control it via http in the SimpleHomeNet application. However, when i try to connect to it in my application, it seems that it is just not making a connection. My connect method is shown below (I don’t want to include the actual IP address for obvious reasons, but the port that it is using is 81 if that makes a difference).

I hope this is not too technical, and this is the correct place to post this, but I was hoping that somebody would have some insight as to why this connect method would work correctly for my local switch, but not one over a public IP – it might have something to do with authentication, which didn’t seem to be required to form a connection to the EZServe switch on the local network.

public void Connect()
{
ezsrveIPAddress = IPAddress.Parse(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[“AHAUS.ControlCenter.SwitchIP”].ToString());
ezsrvePort = int.Parse(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings[“AHAUS.ControlCenter.SwitchPort”].ToString());
ezsrveTcpClient = new TcpClient(ezsrveIPAddress.ToString(), ezsrvePort);
ezsrveTcpClient.ReceiveTimeout = 2000;
ezsrveStream = ezsrveTcpClient.GetStream();

isConnected = true;
}

Hope somebody can help me out, and once again, thanks for your time.

Hey Grif

Please forgive the lateness of getting back to you – I wanted to run a few more tests to make sure that I could give you as much information as I can.

OK – here’s where I stand now – the exception thrown is actually not thrown on the Connect method, but rather in the method that I try to read from the EZServeStream. The exception is as follows:

System.Net.Sockets.SocketException : A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond

I have tried the same program running both from my home network, and the more secured network at the office and it always seems to give the same exception. The line of code that is throwing the exception is this:

byte[] results = new byte[8000];

try

{

int len = ezsrveStream.Read(results, 0, 8000);

The final line of the sample causes the exception. Before this, i have used ezsrveStream.Write to send an XML request for the Devices file, so I’mm fairly sure the Insteon switch is there – it just seems to be unable to read from it. I also have everything wrapped in an

if (ezsrveStream.CanRead)

block, which does return true.

So – I guess my problem is that I’m not sure if the error is in my code, or if it is with the configuration of the EZSrve at the clients location – hopefully this gives a few more details as to the nature of my problem – if you need more code samples, or more information let me know and I’ll be happy to provide what I can.

Thanks again for all your help so far.

Sigh – didn’t even notice that the timeout was set so low 🙁

Ok – I increased the timeout value to 20 seconds (just temporarily) – now what seems to be happening is that it is running the read command, but returning nothing, even though the xml file being sent should be valid as it works on my test switch.

the xml file i’m using to query the devices looks like this:
“”

Once again, thanks for all the help so far. Any idea what could be causing the switch to not respond to this command – could it be that the initial Write is not actually writing the xml request to the EZServe or something like that – as you can probably tell, I’m very new to all this stuff, so it’s a little daunting 🙁

Just tried it with the GetRevision command, and had exactly the same result – the read command returned absolutely nothing. In my debugger, I can see that the command been written to the EZServe is correct, but whether or not that “Write” actually occurs is not apparent, and I don’t know how to verify that – the problem definitely appears to be in this function:

public string GetXMLResults(string XMLInput)

{

if (ezsrveStream != null)

{

ezsrveStream.Close();

}



Connect();



byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(XMLInput);

ezsrveStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);

string XMLString = "";



if (ezsrveStream.CanRead)

{

// Receive the result

byte[] results = new byte[8000];

try

{

int len = ezsrveStream.Read(results, 0, 8000);



if (len > 0)

{

foreach (byte b in results)

{

if (b.ToString() != "0")

{

XMLString += (char)b;

}

}

}



}

catch (Exception ex)

{

//Response.Write("GetXMLResults:" + ex.Message);

}

}

else

{

//Response.Write("Unable to read Network Stream");

}



return XMLString;

}

a little messy, but worked fine with the other switch – the read operation returns a len of 0, and thereafter it exits the function – sigh 🙁