Ping and ARP on both Win and Linux in Python

[Rune Strand]

On Mar 13, 9:14 pm, "Mauro \"Baba\" Mascia" <baba_... at yahoo.it> wrote:
> Hi, this is my question:
>
> I want to know if several switch (about 50) in a big lan are up and then
> know their MAC addresses to do a list that contains host name, ip and mac.
> I know only the range of their IP addresses (the host name it's simply
> to know using socket.gethostn.
>
> The first idea it's to ping all ip, parse the response and then execute
> the command "arp -a" and parse the response.
> However this way depends on the operating system and the ping response
> depends too from the language.
>
> Another way it's to open the main page of the switch and parse the HTML
> code where i can find the MAC address.
> However this way depends on the particular brand's switch.
>
> I know (or better i think) that there is a third way: make ping and arp
> building the packets with socket and so on (but i dont have understand
> in what way do this).
>
> Any suggestion?
>
> (i've already search in google, found many sources but a lot of them
> don't works or don't do what im trying to do...)
>
> Regards,
>     Mauretto.

There are several Ping /ICMP implentations in Python. I did something
similar using a python ping module and parsing the arp cache. A
different approach may be to use SNMP. I believe there are Python
tools around.