Question concerning function of a a socket

[pkm]

My reverse engineering of torchat has led me to a question which I am unable to answer. When I look at the torchat source code, there is a file named tc_client.py, which contains the class “Listener“.

class Listener(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, buddy_list, socket=None):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.buddy_list = buddy_list
        self.conns = []
        self.socket = socket
        self.start()
        self.startTimer()

    def run(self):
        self.running = True
        if not self.socket:
            interface = config.get("client", "listen_interface")
            port = config.getint("client", "listen_port")
            self.socket = tryBindPort(interface, port)
        self.socket.listen(5)
        while self.running:
            try:
                conn, address = self.socket.accept()
                self.conns.append(InConnection(conn, self.buddy_list))
                print "(2) new incoming connection"
                print "(2) have now %i incoming connections" % len(self.conns)
            except:
                print "socket listener error!"
                tb()
                self.running = False


    . . .

On line 19 of the code above, there is a socket on which the accept-method is called. As far as I know, the accept method can only be called on a server socket (I come from the JAVA world, where there exists a difference between a Socket and a ServerSocket object). Is the mentioned socket a server socket?