Order of addresses returned by socket.gethostbyname_ex()

[Cameron Simpson]

On 22Aug2011 04:29, Tomas Lid�n <tomas.liden.privat at gmail.com> wrote:
| On 22 Aug, 12:06, Cameron Simpson <c... at zip.com.au> wrote:
| > It would not surprise me if the order was related to the order a scan of
| > the system interfaces yields information, and I would imagine that may
| > be influenced by the order in which the interfaces were initialised.
| >
| > So getting the LAN first may merely be fortuitous.
| > I wouldn't rely on it, especially if interfaces come and go.
| 
| We did try to disable/enable the interfaces in different orders, but
| always got the same return order from gethostbyname_ex(). So it looked
| pretty stable (on that specific OS). There's been some testing on
| Linux as well, but since this should be used in a general cross
| platform tool we wanted to check the exact behaviour of the method.
| 
| > What if you queried your routing table instead? Usually there's just one
| > default route, and hopefully it would be configured to use the "best"
| > interface.
| 
| Hmm... perhaps. How would you do that?

On UNIX systems (and, I think, also Windows systems) you'd run the command:

  netstat -rn

or use the "route" command. (This avoids using operating system calls
directly - the command will know what to do itself.)

I seem to recall that Windows has the netstat command as well (possibly
because, IIRC, they pulled in the BSD UNIX IP stack for their first IP
implementation).

Anyway, by popening the netstat command you can pull the "default" (or
"0.0.0.0") route from its output. Then see if the interface listed there
corresponds to what you need to know.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Then again, it's probably really because your average Australian doesn't give
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        - Murray Chapman <muzzle at cs.uq.oz.au>