Can two applications listen to the same port?

Question

Can two applications on the same machine bind to the same port and IP address? Taking it a step further, can one app listen to requests coming from a certain IP and the other to another remote IP? I know I can have one application that starts off two threads (or forks) to have similar behavior, but can two applications that have nothing in common do the same?

Answer 1

Yes.

From this article:
https://lwn.net/Articles/542629/

The new socket option allows multiple sockets on the same host to bind to the same port

Answer 2

Short answer:

Going by the answer given here. You can have two applications listening on the same IP address, and port number, so long one of the port is a UDP port, while other is a TCP port.

Explanation:

The concept of port is relevant on the transport layer of the TCP/IP stack, thus as long as you are using different transport layer protocols of the stack, you can have multiple processes listening on the same <ip-address>:<port> combination.

One doubt that people have is if two applications are running on the same <ip-address>:<port> combination, how will a client running on a remote machine distinguish between the two? If you look at the IP layer packet header (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4#Header), you will see that bits 72 to 79 are used for defining protocol, this is how the distinction can be made.

If however you want to have two applications on same TCP <ip-address>:<port> combination, then the answer is no (An interesting exercise will be launch two VMs, give them same IP address, but different MAC addresses, and see what happens - you will notice that some times VM1 will get packets, and other times VM2 will get packets - depending on ARP cache refresh).

I feel that by making two applications run on the same <op-address>:<port> you want to achieve some kind of load balancing. For this you can run the applications on different ports, and write IP table rules to bifurcate the traffic between them.

Also see @user6169806's answer.

Answer 3

If at least one of the remote IPs is already known, static and dedicated to talk only to one of your apps, you may use iptables rule (table nat, chain PREROUTING) to redirect incomming traffic from this address to "shared" local port to any other port where the appropriate application actually listen.

Answer 4

No. Only one application can bind to a port at a time, and behavior if the bind is forced is indeterminate.

With multicast sockets -- which sound like nowhere near what you want -- more than one application can bind to a port as long as SO_REUSEADDR is set in each socket's options.

You could accomplish this by writing a "master" process, which accepts and processes all connections, then hands them off to your two applications who need to listen on the same port. This is the approach that Web servers and such take, since many processes need to listen to 80.

Beyond this, we're getting into specifics -- you tagged both TCP and UDP, which is it? Also, what platform?

Answer 5

Yes (for TCP) you can have two programs listen on the same socket, if the programs are designed to do so. When the socket is created by the first program, make sure the SO_REUSEADDR option is set on the socket before you bind(). However, this may not be what you want. What this does is an incoming TCP connection will be directed to one of the programs, not both, so it does not duplicate the connection, it just allows two programs to service the incoming request. For example, web servers will have multiple processes all listening on port 80, and the O/S sends a new connection to the process that is ready to accept new connections.

SO_REUSEADDR

Allows other sockets to bind() to this port, unless there is an active listening socket bound to the port already. This enables you to get around those "Address already in use" error messages when you try to restart your server after a crash.

Answer 6

When you create a TCP connection, you ask to connect to a specific TCP address, which is a combination of an IP address (v4 or v6, depending on the protocol you're using) and a port.

When a server listens for connections, it can inform the kernel that it would like to listen to a specific IP address and port, i.e., one IP address, or on all of the hosts IP addresses, each on a specific port, which is effectively listening on a lot of different "TCP addresses" (e.g., 192.168.1.10:8000, 127.0.0.1:8000, etc.)

No, you can't have two applications listening on the same "TCP address," because when a message comes in, how would the kernel know to which application to give the message?

However, you in most operating systems you can set up several IP addresses on a single interface (e.g., if you have 192.168.1.10 on an interface, you could also set up 192.168.1.11, if nobody else on the network is using it), and in those cases you could have separate applications listening on port 8000 on each of those two IP addresses.