This sounds like the same problem I ran into recently.  I saw the exact same behavior when I tried compiling the current version of the example programs against the GnuTLS libraries that came with my operating system.  (GnuTLS 2.8.5 on Ubuntu 10.04.)

I'm assuming my issue (and therefore yours) is that I was running example code that was meant for GnuTLS 3.x against an installed library that was GnuTLS 2.x.  (And, presumably the change in major version indicates an incompatibility, although unfortunately in this case it's a rather subtle one.)

When I installed the examples that were meant for the version of GnuTLS I was actually using (by installing the "gnutls-doc" package on Ubuntu, which put the example source code in /usr/share/doc/gnutls-doc/examples), and compiled them, it worked fine.

(Presumably it would also work to build the latest GnuTLS from source, and then use the latest example code, but that's not the approach I went with, because I wanted to write code that would work with Ubuntu's binary packages.)

In particular, the 3.x example code has the while loop you mentioned, while the 2.x example code does not have the while loop.

(The example anonymous server is ex-anon-serv.c in both the 2.x and 3.x examples, but the anonymous client is called ex-client1.c in 2.x, while it's called ex-anon-client.c in 3.x.)

I hope that helps,

--Patrick

On Feb 5, 2012, at 6:06 PM, Mihir Kulkarni wrote:

Hello,

I am part of a team at University of California, Irvine who are trying our hand at GNUTLS. We installed the package and all its dependencies. But when trying with the example code given in the documentation, it throws up an error. The details are:

I tried running the server and client with anonymous authentication. The exact error that it gives is:

CLIENT:

mihir <at> GNU-Linux:~/GNUTLS/gnutls-2.8.6/client$ ./a.out 

*** Handshake failed

GNUTLS ERROR: A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.

SERVER:

mihir <at> GNU-Linux:~/GNUTLS/gnutls-2.8.6/server$ ./a.out 

Server ready. Listening to port '5556'.

- connection from 127.0.0.1, port 48108

*** Handshake has failed (A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.)

What is figured out so far is that the server goes into an infinite loop on line 120 for the statements:

       do

        {

           ret = gnutls_handshake (session);

           printf("Do...\n");

         }

       while (gnutls_error_is_fatal (ret) == 0);

Can someone please tell me what might be going wrong?

Thank you for your help.

regards,
Mihir Kulkarni
Graduate Student
University of California, Irvine

http://goo.gl/CvRcG

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