Provide NICs information a-la ifconfig

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on May 10, 2013 03:16:52

This is somewhat related to issue 250 and aims to provide a replacement for 
ifconfig command on UNIX.
Whereas issue 250 aims to provide something like this:

    >>> psutil.network_ifaces()
    {'lo': nic(up=True, duplex=0, speed=0), 'eth0': nic(up=True, duplex=2, 
speed=100)}

...here we want to provide the IP address(es) and netmask associated with a 
network interface similarly to ifconfig.

It seems that on most (all?) POSIX system we can use getifaddrs(3).
Here's a Linux example using ctypes: 
http://carnivore.it/2010/07/22/python_-_getifaddrs It prints:

    {'eth0': {2: [{'addr': '192.168.1.2', 'netmask': '255.255.255.0'}],
              10: [{'addr': 'fe80::92e6:baff:fe80:e90d',
                    'netmask': 'ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::',
                    'scope': 2L}],
              17: [{'addr': '90:e6:ba:80:e9:0d'}]},
     'lo': {2: [{'addr': '127.0.0.1', 'netmask': '255.0.0.0'}],
            10: [{'addr': '::1',
                  'netmask': 'ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff'}],
            17: [{'addr': '00:00:00:00:00:00'}]}}


Here's a similar implementation for OSX / BSD: 
http://carnivore.it/2010/07/22/python_-_getifaddrs On FreeBSD it prints:

    [ifaddrs(name='usbus0', flags=65537L, family=18, address='', netmask=None),
     ifaddrs(name='em0', flags=34883L, family=18, address='00:50:56:28:ec:d8', 
netmask=None),
     ifaddrs(name='em0', flags=34883L, family=2, address='10.31.8.132', 
netmask='255.255.255.0'),
     ifaddrs(name='usbus1', flags=65537L, family=18, address='', netmask=None),
     ifaddrs(name='plip0', flags=34832L, family=18, address='', netmask=None),
     ifaddrs(name='lo0', flags=32841L, family=18, address='', netmask=None),
     ifaddrs(name='lo0', flags=32841L, family=28, address='::1', 
netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff'),
     ifaddrs(name='lo0', flags=32841L, family=28, address='fe80:5::1', 
netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::'),
     ifaddrs(name='lo0', flags=32841L, family=2, address='127.0.0.1', 
netmask='255.0.0.0')]


In terms of final API it seems natural to provide a single function which 
provides all of these infos in one shot (NIC status up/down, speed, duplex plus 
all associated addresses provided by getifaddrs) but given that the internal 
implementation uses very different approaches I prefer to treat and develop the 
two functionalities separately for now.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/psutil/issues/detail?id=376

[giampaolo]

From phi...@cloudera.com on May 13, 2013 16:47:54

For what it's worth, http://alastairs-place.net/projects/netifaces/ is a 
library with what looks like similar goals to yours.

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on May 15, 2013 16:42:42

Linux implementeation committed as revision 259cf1979d3a .

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on May 16, 2013 18:57:05

FreeBSD implementation committed in revision f1e8283cb6a4 .

Status: Started

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 15, 2013 04:43:03

I can't see how can I get a list of all available network interface ids?

I am looking into some call to return ["lo", "eth0"] list in one step.
The next I'd like to do is to get all IPs for each interface "by-id".

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 15, 2013 04:46:58

Probably a hack, but I found this:

$ cat /proc/net/dev
Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    
packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo: 9108970   99862    0    0    0     0          0         0  9108970   
99862    0    0    0     0       0          0
  eth0: 350377139  290149    0    0    0     0          0         0 31993244  
236043    0    0    0     0       0          0

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 15, 2013 04:49:27

So, I an list those as:

    ifaces = []
    with open("/proc/net/dev", "rb") as netstat:
         for i, line in enumerate(netstat):
             if i < 2:  # skip first two header lines
                 continue
             parts = line.split(':')
             ifaces += [parts[0].strip()]
    print ifaces

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on December 16, 2013 05:30:31

I started developing this feature in a separate branch so that's why it is not 
available yet (Windows, OSX and Solaris implementations are still missing).
If you want a list of all available NIC names you can already do that by using:

    >>> import psutil
    >>> list(psutil.net_io_counters(pernic=True))
    ['lo', 'wlan0', 'eth1']
    >>>

Obviously you won't get the associated IP addresses.

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 16, 2013 07:45:17

This interface is very hackish. =)

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on December 16, 2013 07:51:01

The main goal of net_io_counters() is to provide IO stats, not NIC names, 
that's why  "list(psutil.net_io_counters(pernic=True))" looks hackish.

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 16, 2013 08:48:35

I found an easy way to list all NICs:

    $ ls  /sys/class/net
    eth0  lo

[giampaolo]

From techtonik@gmail.com on December 16, 2013 08:50:05

Or more pythonically:

    >>> import os
    >>> os.listdir('/sys/class/net')
    ['lo', 'eth0']

The only problem now is to get IPs for those.

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on December 16, 2013 08:52:14

The purpose of this ticket is not to provide an API to retrieve NIC names.
We already have a function which can indirectly be used to do that and when 
this issue will be closed as fixed we'll have 2.
I don't think providing yet another (3) API for the same functionality is a good idea.
We'll just use psutil.net_ifaces().keys() and be done with it.

[giampaolo]

Update: as of now it seems this function is implemented for all UNIX flavors. The only missing platform is Windows.

>>> import psutil
>>> from pprint import pprint as pp
>>> pp(psutil.net_i
psutil.net_if_addrs(     psutil.net_io_counters(  
>>> pp(psutil.net_if_addrs())
{'docker0': [snic(family=2, address='172.17.42.1', netmask='255.255.0.0', broadcast='172.17.42.1'),
             snic(family=10, address='fe80::64f5:58ff:fef9:779a%docker0', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::', broadcast=None),
             snic(family=17, address='66:f5:58:f9:77:9a', netmask=None, broadcast='ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff')],
 'lo': [snic(family=2, address='127.0.0.1', netmask='255.0.0.0', broadcast='127.0.0.1'),
        snic(family=10, address='::1', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff', broadcast=None),
        snic(family=17, address='00:00:00:00:00:00', netmask=None, broadcast='00:00:00:00:00:00')],
 'lxcbr0': [snic(family=2, address='10.0.3.1', netmask='255.255.255.0', broadcast='10.0.3.255'),
            snic(family=10, address='fe80::b44e:7fff:fea5:4874%lxcbr0', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::', broadcast=None),
            snic(family=17, address='b6:4e:7f:a5:48:74', netmask=None, broadcast='ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff')],
 'wlan0': [snic(family=2, address='192.168.0.10', netmask='255.255.255.0', broadcast='192.168.0.255'),
           snic(family=10, address='2a02:8109:83c0:224c::5', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff', broadcast=None),
           snic(family=10, address='2a02:8109:83c0:224c:3975:9903:34cd:cc60', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::', broadcast=None),
           snic(family=10, address='2a02:8109:83c0:224c:c685:8ff:fe45:641', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::', broadcast=None),
           snic(family=10, address='fe80::c685:8ff:fe45:641%wlan0', netmask='ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::', broadcast=None),
           snic(family=17, address='c4:85:08:45:06:41', netmask=None, broadcast='ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff')]}
>>> 

Everything works fine on my laptop but on Travis we get a segfault:
https://travis-ci.org/giampaolo/psutil/jobs/36085270
This is a big showstopper as I cannot reproduce the issue.

I'm not sure about the function name yet (net_if_addrs) because of #250. We might have a single net_ifaces() function returning both the addresses associated with the interface and other information about it (namely speed, duplex and is_up).