Replies to Ping broadcast - c++

I'm writing a program in .NET c++. I'm sending a broadcast ping on my local network. All of my target devices are able to respond to a ping broadcast, and indeed i track all of their responses in Wireshark. My goal is to retrieve IP addresses of all responding stations.
Problem is, Microsoft's API does not include support for recording all replies in a given time interval.Functions like IcmpSendEcho simply return on first reply (although the API states that it can record more than one icmp reply), this is a known issue and after googling and searching here, everyone reports the same problem with these functions.
What can I do to achieve my goal without going too low-level for reply fetching?
Does windows hold some sort of a record of icmp history?
I'll be grateful for any suggestions!

1) First call FlushIpNetTable.
2) Send the ping and ignore the response.
3) Read the ARP table using the GetIpNetTable call.

Related

0MQ - get message ip

First, I want to give thanks for that amazing lib! I love it. A client is connecting himself to a server. The server should save the IP and do stuff with it later on (I really need the IP). I found that answer: http://lists.zeromq.org/pipermail/zeromq-dev/2010-September/006381.html but I don't understand how I get the IP out of the message (a XREP)... I think I am only able to read the ID, but the IP is managed internally by 0MQ. His second solution suggests to send the IP as part of the message, but I don't understand how to get the "public"-IP. I found that post: Get TCP address information in ZeroMQ
is pass bind a service to an ephemeral port, get a full connection endpoint ("tcp://ipaddress:port")
I don't get how this works. Does he mean something like a web-service?
In my opinion, it would be best to get the IP out of 0MQ (it has the IP already). I would even adjust 0MQ for that, if somebody could point to the place where the IP is saved, couldn't find it. The socket types are not that important, at the moment. I would prefer smth REQ-REP like. Thank you!
Summary:
TL;DR answer to your question is: you can't get IP address of the peer that sent a message, using ZeroMQ API.
Explanation:
ZeroMQ does not expose peer IP address because it is irrelevant for the message based communication that ZeroMQ is designed for. When it is possible for ZeroMQ to get IP address of client that is connecting to server (in example using method described here), it is useless. For a longer explanation here is how it works inside ZeroMQ and any other server implementation.
Server side of the connection does not handle connected clients by the means of the hashtable that maps IP to client, but by keeping track of connected "sockets" (socket descriptors) - when a server accepts (using accept()) a connection, it receives from operating system socket descriptor to use to communicate with connected peer. All server has to do is keep that descriptor around to read() from and write() to that client. Another client that connects to server receives another socket descriptor.
To summarize: even if ZeroMQ would be able to provide you with IP of connected peer, you should not depend on it. ZeroMQ hides from you connection management so you can focus on messaging. Connection management includes reconnections, which may result in a change of IP without changing the actual ZeroMQ socket connected on the other side.
So here's an example of why you might want to get the ip address a message was delivered from: we have a server whose job it is to synchronize updates onto occasionally-connected clients (think mobile devices here, though this is an extreme example of a mobile deivce.)
When the mobile unit comes onto the network, it sends a list of it's firmware files to the server via a dealer-router connection. The server has a list of all applicable firmware files; if the client needs an update it will initiate an update via a separate mechanism.
Since the IPs for the devices can (and do) change, we need to know the IP address associated with the mobile device FOR THIS CONNECTION, i.e. right now.
Yes, we absolutely can have the client send it's IP address in the message, but that's a waste of another n bytes of valuable satellite air time, and while not pure evil, is sure annoying. Zmq already has this information, if it didn't have it, it wouldn't be able to generate replies. The address is in the socket data, there's no reason the message couldn't (optionally, for all you guys who use wired networks and think disconnects are the exception) include a reference to the socket structure so you can get the address out of it. Other than pedantic religiosity, which is far too common in zmq.
The way ZeroMQ is designed there's no information provided on the remote IP. As far as I know you have to manage this through your application by sending that information as a message of some sort.
The messages themselves use an IP-agnostic ID which has more to do with the instance of ZeroMQ running than any particular interface. This is because there may be more than one transport method and interface connecting the two instances.

Single socket sends and receives over both wlan and eth interface

Using C++ I create a single UDP socket, supplying both an IPv4 address and port. I run this on Ubuntu and have both a wlan0 and eth0 interface up and running. Apparently something decides that both interfaces should be used, I appreciate that. Sending and receiving using a different interface does create a kind of a pickle (NAT traversal???) for me though. Using Wireshark I can see packages coming in, but my application does not register them.
To clarify:
I have a tracker which will supply me with a peer. The tracker will also contact that peer to send me a message. In order to overcome NAT traversal issues, I will send a puncture message.
The problem now is that the puncture messages is sent over wlan (I am testing locally with two machines), whereas the messages from the peer are coming in over eth.
So, I think the simplest solution would be to simply use one interface. (Or both one socket)
EDIT:
I will try what is mentioned here on specifying a single interface.
#Barmar, pointed out that UDP sockets may change interface when sendto is called with a destination address that would benefit from it.
I am still fuzzy on the reason for my problem though. Can someone explain why this is an issue in the first place?
EDIT2:
The above mentioned solution of forcing one interface for the socket bind did not work. Apparently the sendto method will choose to ignore this and still go for the other interface if it feels that that will work better.
Does anyone know how to make sure that socket sticks to the interface it was assigned to?
If you need to ensure that UDP replies come from the same address that the request was sent to, the solution is to use multiple sockets. You open one socket for each IP of the server (this may be more than one socket per interface, because of interface aliases), and bind the socket to that IP. Then you use select() or poll() to wait for requests on all sockets at once. When a request comes in on a particular socket, you send the reply out through that same socket, and its source IP will match the original packet's destination.

Timing sending and receiving the same packet

I would like to time how quickly the latency is of a system by sending a packet with the same dest IP as the source IP. Is this relatively simple to do?
How would you custom-build the packets?
Would setting the two IP addresses achieve what I am after?
What is the best timing method?
Any tips/ideas at a low/high level would be greatly appreciated. I intend to use C/C++ on Unix with the boost libraries and libpcap.
EDIT: I should add I will be doing this on a home network, behind a router. I presume the packet will go to the router and come straight back if I were to use 192.168.2.1 (local IP of my system) for the source and dest addresses.
You can just try ping to your own IP. this will produce ICMP packets. There are libraries which also allows you to do the same from an application.
If you want to create packets for yourself you can use socket API. Remember, you can send the source IP address and destination IP address as same, but the port number needs to be different.
For timing you need can use gettimeofday function.
EDIT:
you can ping from your C++ program. See: http://verplant.org/liboping/ or check out some other forum. The reason i emphasized on ping is because it returns right back from the network stack. If you send a UDP packet on the other hand, expecting the application to return and echo, then the processing time of the packet on the listening server gets added.
If you ping to local machine ip (or even lo) it returns without going to switch or next hop router. It will respond even if you remove your eth cable or wifi.
What you are trying to do is implemented in NTP daemon with NTP protocol though.
You don't need a custom package for this. Just create a socket connecting to the same ip-address as the server, and start sending packages. Note that these packages will never leave the network stack, so what you will be measuring is basically how quick the system copies data between user-space and kernel-space.
For the timing, you can use the clock function, it's probably the one most widely used for such things.

WinpCap block internet access

I want to block internet access for the particular website like yahoo or gmail or any other. I researched a lot on google and came up with the library which offer packet sniffing and manipulation. I can read packet and get the destination ip and source ip address of the server and the client computer. as far as my understanding related to the topic is, to block the any url i need to send the FIN packet to the server which indicates to the server that I don't want any more packets. so I need to create a packet with destination ip address and send it to the server (like yahoo etc). can you help me on this, some code snippet or way around, or any other correct approach for this task.
Any help on this would be much appreciated.
Thanks
http://www.winpcap.org/docs/docs_40_2/html/main.html
Start with understanding on how to "trace" the packets, read filtered packets, what Raw IP is and then attempt on blocking/modifiying the packets. WinPcap is powerful, but may not be easy to adapt.
I've used http://netfiltersdk.com/ successfully. Its a commercial project but they have a demo version which you could use for your homework.
Remember you can apply your blocking rules on the Internet traffic which flows through your pipe. The key is to direct all traffic to pass through your pipe and your application which operates on that pipe decides what to pass and what to block. But here we have Winpcap which is used for sniffing, packet injection, statistics gathering e.t.c just like a spectator watching whats going on. Its not used to block a packet coming from Internet.

Rebind a socket to a different interface

Is there an existing Linux/POSIX C/C++ library or example code for how to rebind a socket from one physical interface to another?
For example, I have ping transmitting on a socket that is associated with a physical connection A and I want to rebind that socket to physical connection B and have the ping packets continue being sent and received on connection B (after a short delay during switch-over).
I only need this for session-less protocols.
Thank you
Update:
I am trying to provide failover solution for use with PPP and Ethernet devices.
I have a basic script which can accomplish 90% of the functionality through use of iptables, NAT and routing table.
The problem is when the failover occurs, the pings continue being sent on the secondary connection, however, their source IP is from the old connection.
I've spoken with a couple of people who work on commercial routers and their suggestion is to rebind the socket to the secondary interface.
Update 2:
I apologise for not specifying this earlier. This solution will run on a router. I cannot change the ping program because it will run on the clients computer. I used ping as just an example, any connection that is not session-based should be capable of being switched over. I tested this feature on several commercial routers and it does work. Unfortunately, their software is proprietary, however, from various conversations and testing, I found that they are re-binding the sockets on failover.
As of your updated post, the problem is that changing the routing info is not going to change the source address of your ping, it will just force it out the second interface. This answer contains some relevant info.
You'll need to change the ping program. You can use a socket-per-interface approach and somehow inform the program when to fail over. Or you will have to close the socket and then bind to the second interface.
You can get the interface info required a couple of ways including calling ioctl() with the SIOCGIFCONF option and looping through the returned structures to get the interface address info.
I do't think that's quite a well-defined operation. the physical interfaces have different MAC addresses, so unless you have a routing layer mapping them (NAT or the like) then they're going to have different IP addresses.
Ports are identified by a triple of <IP addr, Port number, protocol> so if your IP address changes the port is going to change.
What are you really trying to do here?
I'm not at all sure what you're trying to accomplish, but I have a guess... Are you trying to do some kind of failover? If so, then there are indeed ways to accomplish that, but why not do it in the OS instead of the application?
On one end you can use CARP, and on the other you can use interface trunking/bonding (terminology varies) in failover mode.