query whether IP address is bound?

[David Sommerseth]

On 23/11/2018 14:59, Felipe Gasper wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I’m looking for a way to query whether the (Linux) kernel has a specific
> IP address bound. Forking is not an option. I’d like to avoid directly
> enumerating every IP address on the machine, which appears to be the only way
> that RtNetlink facilitates this. (I’d love to be contradicted on that!)

I believe this is basically going outside the scope of D-Bus itself, but I've
played with similar things as I did some contribution to python-ethtool way
too many years ago.

Basically, the Linux kernel provides two ways to retrieve IP and network
configurations. You've found one, using Netlink and the other one is an older
approach using ioctl calls.  The latter one is not recommended as it does not
really support IPv6 and also handles multiple IP addresses on a single
interface in a horrendous way - often you cannot get all the information you
need.  The Netlink interface (while quite tricky to work with, due to the
flexibility of the protocol) is by far the best approach.  Also worth
thinet-tools uses ioctl calls, iirc and iproute2 uses Netlink.

There are some Netlink libraries which tries to make things easier.  I've
played with the libnl libraries, and I find them cumbersome and needlessly
complicated, due to this callback approach.  In the OpenVPN community we have
some code for review which implements a simpler interface to Netlink (it is
even called that: SITNL - Simplified Interface To NetLink) [1].  It does not
implement the code to retrieve IP addresses (only adding and removing them),
but you might get some inspiration from this code.

[1] <https://patchwork.openvpn.net/patch/551/>


> Does the usual suite of D-Bus interfaces on a Linux machine have any
> function that checks this? I’m looking through NetworkManager but only see
> logic for listing the addresses. Or do folks here have any other ideas for
> how I might approach this?
Querying NetworkManager probably works reasonably well on systems which uses
NM for managing the various devices.  But if an interface is configured to be
managed outside if NM, you might not get this information from NM.  In
addition, there are systems who don't have NM installed as well.


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth
OpenVPN Inc