Using the output of "ipconfig /all" i can get what I need but I want a more reliable technique to get ip of an interface (practically the interface has to be identified by it's name) in case of ipconfig was corrupted or was not available for any reason.
I'm not sure what you mean by "server and client", but if you're looking for an API that tells you the IP address(es) associated with the local machine's network interfaces, check out getifaddrs() (for Linux/MacOSX/POSIX) and GetAdaptersAddresses() (for Windows). If you want a usage example for those calls, have a look at the GetNetworkInterfaceInfos() function in this file.
(If you wanted to get the IP address of a client connected to the local machine, call getpeername() on the socket that is associated with that client's connection)
Since you mentioned ipconfig, I assume you want to do this on windows.
Windows has a set of IP Helper apis designed for retrieval and modify networking settings.
And here is a simple sample: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366298(VS.85).aspx
Related
I'm writing a macOS C++ application using Qt that acts as both a UDP client and UDP server. The server functionality allows the user to configure which port the UDP packets will be received on, and the client functionality allows specifying both a target host and a port number. The host can be either a hostname or an IP address, including addresses or hostnames that resolve to a multicast or broadcast address.
In order to help prevent circularity, when the server functionality is enabled I need to be able to warn the user when the host and port they've entered for the client would send the packets directly to the app's server. Of course it's easy to check if the port numbers match, but this means I need to know whether the host they've entered refers to the current system.
Examples of hostnames or IP addresses that would typically be problematic:
127.0.0.1
localhost
192.168.1.255 (assuming the system is on a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet)
any of the IP addresses assigned to the current system's network interfaces
the system's local DNS name
any other loopback addresses that may be configured other than 127.0.0.1
How could I go about detecting this?
Since this app is being written using Qt, a solution that exclusively uses Qt's framework would be ideal. But if that's not possible (since Qt doesn't handle every possible use case) a macOS-specific solution will work too.
QNetworkInterface class should provide the most information you may need.
You can obtain a list of IP addresses using QNetworkInterface::allAddresses() static function.
You can also get a list of all interfaces using QNetworkInterface::allInterfaces().
Calling QNetworkInterface::addressEntries() for each QNetworkInterface returned by QNetworkInterface::allInterfaces() will give you more information about address entries for each interface.
auto ifs = QNetworkInterface::allInterfaces();
foreach (auto interface , ifs){
auto addresses = interface.addressEntries();
foreach ( auto addy , addresses){
///play with the addy here.
}
}
You can also test hostnames against those ip addresses which you are going to ban, using QDnsLookup class.
I have a system with multiple NIC and so multiple ip addresses and I've to use an SDK whose initialization that needs my local address and the remote address.
I want to autoselect the local endpoint. At the moment I'm enumerating all local addresses (via GetAdaptersAddresses) checking for the best match ( to be correct I should use the subnet mask).
But given that this job is done by the routing table is there any Windows API that given a remote address gives me back the right local endpoint ?
is there any Windows API that given a remote address gives me back the right local endpoint ?
Have a look at GetBestInterface() and GetBestInterfaceEx().
Both functions return an index to an interface. You can then retrieve the interface's IP by enumerating network interfaces with GetIpAddrTable(), or enumerating network adapters with GetAdaptersInfo()/GetAdaptersAddresses(), until you find an entry with a matching interface index.
How can I get all the IP addresses and associated host names in a LAN?
To get the list of interfaces and IP addresses, use getifaddrs().
Search for interfaces with ifa_addr->sa_family == AF_INET
The IP address is in sin_addr.s_addr.
You can then use gethostbyaddr() to look up the DNS name for that IP address.
Update:
It was pointed out to me that the OP was probably asking about discovering other hosts, rather than the addresses of interfaces on the local machine.
There is no reliable way to discover other machines on the local area network, but there are a couple of tricks.
Ping method: Use the ping utility (or a programatic equivalent) to ping the local broadcast address, then see who responds. The broadcast address can be found by listing the interfaces as shown above. I believe ICMP does not require root access under OSX. Note that many systems may have ICMP ping disabled or firewalled, so you will only get responses from the non-stealth ones.
ARP method: Check the system ARP cache to see what IP addresses have been recently active. This will only show systems which have broadcast packets on the same network segment in recent minutes.
Both methods can be blocked by firewalls, routers, and even switches, so the exact borders of the "LAN" can be pretty narrow. Both methods can be implemented programmatically, but it might be simpler and more portable to just call out to the command line ping or arp commands.
I'm fiddling with the sockets ioctl's to get the current interfaces setup and I can already get the IP, interface name, netmask and check if the interface is up or down, (I just do IOCTl to SIOCGIFCONF, SIOCGIFNETMASK and SIOCGIFFLAGS).
I am looking for a way to tell if my current IP address was obtained through dhcp or if it was static.
I can check /etc/network/interfaces for everything I want, but I'm looking for a way to do it programmaticly (does this word exist?).
Does anyone have any insight into this?
One more thing, I'm working on Linux (for now).
Cheers
With the wide variety of DHCP clients on Linux -- pump, dhcpcd, dhclient, udhcpc, and quite possibly others that I do not know of -- this isn't possible in a general sense.
However, if you are targeting a specific distribution -- say, "default install of Ubuntu" -- then you can investigate solutions such as Stefan's. Note that all four of the DHCP clients listed here can be installed on Ubuntu and can replace the default DHCP client, dhclient.
If you're running Ubuntu, the leases are stored in /var/lib/dhcp3/dhclient-[interface_name].lease, maybe that's a start.
I don't think its possible to tell via a kernel interface (ioctl) if an IP address was allocated via DHCP as in most distributions DHCP is a userland app that just configures the kernel with data provided by a remote source as if the user had done it manually. In fact, if you look at the ISC dhclient it just passes the data received from the DHCP server to simple shell scripts that do ifconfig, route and various other commands that you could type as a user.
So you'll probably have to look at methods that are specific to your DHCP client and distribution as suggested by Stefan.
i have known that winpcap library enabled a person to obtain advanced information about installed devices...
given all the networking devices found in the computer, how will i know which one of this has an internet connection?!
thanks:)
You typically don't care about this. Normally you just ask the network stack to make a connection, and don't worry about details.
However, each "device" will have its own IP address. You can request the network stack to use this IP address when making a connection.
Now, to figure which devices have an intenet connection, iterate over all of them, obtain their IP address, and try to create a connection from that originating IP to a destination IP on the Internet. Typically you already know such a destination IP, e.g. your companies webserver.
GetAdaptersInfo() will give you a list of all network adapters installed in a form that you can then use in GetIfEntry(). This latter function will tell you the operational status of an adapter, so you can at least tell if the adapter is plugged into a live hub/switch/router.
If you are particularly interested in IP connectivity, you could look to see if a default gateway is configured for that interface. Don't forget you might have to support IPv6 as well as IP4 if you try this.
Correlating the network adapters found by GetAdaptersInfo() with those found by pcap_findalldevs() is left as an exercise for the reader. I don't remember the details but it was fairly obvious.