Somehow I made it up to 2007 without ever writing code that opened a raw network connection or pulled apart a TCP/IP packet. Naturally, I had some hand-wavy notions of more-or-less what was going on under the hood—in college I took a 400 level CS course based on an old edition of Tanenbaum’s excellent Introduction to Computer Networks. But our homework was all theoretical, and I didn’t delve very deeply into the practicality of what powers our modern Internet.

But this year I was tasked to port some Windows networking code to Linux and OS/X. Looking at what was there, I guessed it was no big deal and said I’d do it. After all…there is a layer of abstraction known as “Berkeley sockets” which is practically identical to the UNIX API for reading and writing files. How hard could it be to recompile that on a new platform?

Though sometimes it might not be that hard, this case turned out to include the functionality of a DHCP server. The Windows version was able to work at the socket level by broadcasting UDP packets to 255.255.255.255, but the OS/X and Linux versions fundamentally couldn’t do it this way. Their semantics are different for how the socket calls are translated into packets.

I want to talk about some of the high-level gotchas to watch out for if you’ve just never run up against these particular dark alleys. Because I’m talking about “weirdness” only, I’m not going to explain basic mundane socket programming—because there are many guides explaining that. (One of the best I found was Beej’s Guide to Network Programming—so check that out if you’re interested.)

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