ifconfig in python

[Mark Wooding]

"James Mills" <prologic at shortcircuit.net.au> writes:

> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Nehemiah Dacres <vivacarlie at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is ther an easy way to get the resolved ip address of the machine a
>> script is running on? socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname) has
>> only returned the ip address of my loop back interface ... not very
>> usefull.
>
> That's because your /etc/hosts resolves your hostname to 127.0.0.1 :)

This just illustrates the real problem with the OP's question.  The idea
of `/the/ ... ip address of the machine' is simply ill-formed.

An Internet host has at least two IP addresses -- one of them is
127.0.0.1 -- and may have many more.  The laptop I'm typing on right now
has three; the server next door has four.  Network interfaces may have
multiple addresses associated with them (and hosts using the weak
end-system model consider the addresses as referring to the host in
general rather than a specific interface anyway), and several interfaces
might have the same address.

Sorry.  Life's more complicated than you'd like it to be.

-- [mdw]