[Mono-list] Remoting: SocketException on Windows client when server runs on Linux (certain machines)

[Helge Lenuweit]

Hello mono folks,

after the success of using mono-service with a ServiceProcess-based 
application (thanks again Jörg for your remark - yes indeed, there are 
problems with service shutdown [but it *ends* somehow...]), I have come 
across a weird show-stopper related to remoting/network/??. 
Unfortunately, I don't really have a clue on this:

There's basically a client/server situation with the client being a 
Windows application calling a server via TcpChannel on Linux/mono. The 
remoted singleton object has a method that returns a class that acts 
like a CAO. This works very well with my SuSE 9.1 based test 
environment. For some reason, it does not work with the server running 
on a freshly installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (additionally 
installed pkg-config and mono-complete RPMs there). My Windows client 
gets the proxy instances of the remote objects, but the first call to 
the actual worker object fails - with a SocketException, telling me the 
destination host is unreachable!? Huh!

Now, equipped with my limited skillset of network analysis, I took the 
challenge. Ping works either way using the IP, host name, fully 
qualified name. Nslookups (forward and reverse) return the proper 
results. I would be glad to learn about (a) what this could be or (b) 
how to further tackle down the issue. It seems that a return from the 
server side has a wrong URL, perhaps one that points to a localhost 
address or so? Might WINS be an issue here (as there's a Samba server on 
the PC that works)? What else? There are no firewalls on either side. I 
can even telnet the server on the port in question and see there's 
"something going on there".

Thanks for your remarks,
Helge