Swap:Custom Protocol
From Adapt
SWAP has a custom protocol available that is used for management and inter-node communication. This is a persistent socket connection between nodes. This is not run over http due to the small size of most messages and overhead in establishing a connection for each message.
Mina
SWAP uses mina to manage socket communication. Protocol decoding is handled through a set of filters and a final handler to dispatch command.
Wire-level message Structure
Each SWAP command is sent as a list of a single SWAP message. This is done to allow efficient packing of small messages (ie, results of stat, etc)
- Int - size of message (type + reps + content)
- short - message type (See MessageType enum)
- short - repetitions of message
( byte[] - content
Content is the list of packed messages. Each message is composed of a set of primitive segments (long, string, uuid, long[], etc). What segments comprise a message are described in the MessageType enum. Allowable types of segments are defined in MessageSegment.
For example, the GET_PATH_DETAILS request has the following structure:
- UUID - uuid of file group
- STRING[] - list of paths for details w/in that file group.
To request for just one group the message would have the following information:
- size=message size
- type=13,
- reps=1
- UUID of file group
- "path1","path2"
Since we can issue multiple requests of the same message, in one message, we could include a request for files from two different groups. This message would look slightly different:
- size=message size
- type=13
- reps=2
- UUID of group 1
- "path1","path2"
- UUID of group 2
- "path3","path4"
This packing and unpacking is handled by the two mina filters, SwapProtocolEncoder and SwapProtocolDecoder. These two filters encode/decode messages to and from an array of SwapMessage. A SwapMessage is a simple container holding the type of message along w/ the an array of Objects representing the message content. The size of the content is equal to the number of segments in a message * the number of repetitions in a message.
Authentication
Due to how swap authenticates against LDAP, clients must supply a clear-text username and password to the server. To secure this, an ssl tunnel is established during the initial connection to a swap server. Once authentication has finished the client may tell the server to disable the tunnel.