getpeername() Returns Wrong Data

Question

I am writing my first sockets program on Linux and am trying to print the IP address and port of the peer I have connected to. I use getpeername() along with inet_ntop() and ntohs() to get the data out of the sockaddr_in struct. When I look at the results, I get an IP address that does not go to any server that I know of (ping fails) and says that I am listening to a port that netstat says is not being used.

What am I doing wrong? I should be getting 130.215.28.181:39000, but instead I am getting 209.94.72.137:18825 every time I run the program. Looking at netstat shows that I am indeed listening on port 39000.

Here is a snippet from my client program:

connect(sockfd,&serv_addr,sizeof(serv_addr))

// print welcome message
char ipstr[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN];
bzero(ipstr, 50);
struct sockaddr_in *address;
socklen_t address_len = sizeof(*address);
getpeername(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) address, &address_len);
inet_ntop(AF_INET, &address->sin_addr, ipstr, sizeof(ipstr));
printf("Connection established successfully with %s:%i!\n", ipstr, ntohs(address->sin_port));

Answer 1

You're not allocating any memory for your sockaddr_in structure, you's just passing a pointer to some random memory location. Instead, allocate the address structure on the stack:

struct sockaddr_in addr;
socklen_t addr_len = sizeof(addr);
int err = getpeername(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &addr, &addr_len);
if (err != 0) {
   // error
}

You should also be checking the return value of every function that is documented to return an error code. In particular, both connect and getpeername return error codes that you should be checking.