Hi everybody, I am not sure if this question belongs in the Linux or in the Network forum, but I think it is a mire Linux related question: I am trying to determine the IP address of the local computer, so that I can compare it with the IP address a server tells me, my computer has. That way I can find out if I am behind a NAT or not. I tried the following code:

char szHostName[128];
  char ip[16] = "\0";
  struct hostent *pHost;
  int i;
  
  if(gethostname(szHostName, 128) == 0)
    {
      pHost = gethostbyname(szHostName);
      for(i=0; i<pHost->h_length; i++)
	{
	  if(i > 0)
	    sprintf(ip, "%s.", ip);
	  sprintf(ip, "%s%u", ip, (unsigned int)((unsigned char *)pHost->h_addr_list[0]));
	}
      cout << "Address : " << ip << endl;
    }
  return 0;

The output is Address : 127.0.0.1 I also tried this:

 char ac[80];
    gethostname(ac, sizeof(ac));
    
    cout << "Host name is " << ac << "." << endl;

    struct hostent *phe = gethostbyname(ac);
    if (phe == 0) {
        cerr << "Yow! Bad host lookup." << endl;
        return 1;
    }

    for (int i = 0; phe->h_addr_list != 0; ++i) {
        struct in_addr addr;
        memcpy(&addr, phe->h_addr_list, sizeof(struct in_addr));
        cout << "Address " << i << ": " << inet_ntoa(addr) << endl;
    }

And get: Host name is Sam. Address 0: 127.0.0.1 But the IP address of eth0 is 10.10.152.49! How could my programm find out this address??? Thanks! Nathan

the 127.0.0.1 IP adress is a standard reserved adress and ALWAYS refers to the local computer. I dunno how to get the 'real'ip adress, but 127.0.0.1 will be your local IP on any computer, anywhere. it's probably there for testing, so you could do some network stuff on just one pc, for compatibility reasons (running the server and the user on the same pc, for instance).

maybe you should look into the inner workings of the Internet Protocol before you continue. No offense, but this is just common knowledge - i dont know much about networking but manage to know this.

I know that 127.0.0.1 is always the address of localhost, but that is why this IP is not helping me at all.
I need some way to get all the IP addresses associated with the computer and not just the loopback!

the command /sbin/ifconfig provides you, among other things, the IP addresses of your connection. Odds are your looking for the IP address associated with eth0 ( your standard ethernet card) or ppp0, your standard dial-up.

/sbin/ifconifg is cool, but I need to find out the IP form within a C++ programm!

ifconfig is an open source program...

Just call ifconfig and parse the output.

It's pretty difficult getting the ip of the computer. If I have 3 ethernet cards (I have at least one with 4), each one can have a different ip address, plus you can have virtual ethernet cards with extra addresses.

Best way is to design your network protocol so it works with or without NAT. NAT is supposed to be transparent. UDP (I don't think it matters for TCP) tells you who sent you the packet [man recvmsg] hence you can find out who to send something back to.

Why do you want to tell if someone is behind NAT anyway? I can't think of a circumstance in which it's actually useful.

Firstly, thanks for all your answers!
I need to tell if somebody is behind a NAT (and to know is local IP) so that I can connect two clients which both are behind NATs directly using a technique described on this page:

http://www.mindcontrol.org/~hplus/nat-punch.html

I need the local IPs of the clients because IF they are behind the same NAT, they need to send packages to each other using the local IPs.

Parsing the output of /sbin/ifconfig ... sounds not very easy. It seems strange to me that there is no other way.

Does anybody know where I can get the source-code of ifconfig or to which packages it belongs? I googled, but without success.
Thanks!

OK, I found a solution.
For everybody who likes to know too:

int main(){  //Create a socket  int s=socket(AF_INET,SOCK_DGRAM,0);  sockaddr_in Addr;  Addr.sin_family=AF_INET;  //This needs to be some IP out there (in my case its www.google.de)  Addr.sin_addr.s_addr=inet_addr("66.102.11.99");  Addr.sin_port=htons(999);  //Connect the socket  connect(s,(struct sockaddr*)&Addr,sizeof(Addr));  socklen_t size=sizeof(Addr);  //Get socket name  getsockname(s,(struct sockaddr*)&Addr,&size);  //Print IP  printf("%s\n",inet_ntoa(Addr.sin_addr));}

Um, you're connecting to another machine, jsut to get your IP address?

Here's a better method:



Adjust as needed. :)