Finding whether an interface is up on your machine

If you have multiple network interfaces on your machine, before doing any work on a particular interface, you would like to know the status of that network interface, for example, if the interface is actually up. This makes sure that you route your command to active interfaces.

Getting ready

This recipe is written for a Linux machine. So, this script will not run on a Windows or macOS host. In this recipe, we use Nmap, a famous network scanning tool. You can find more about Nmap from its website http://nmap.org/.

Install Nmap in your computer. For Debian-based systems, the command is:

$ sudo apt-get install nmap

 

 

 

 

You also need the python-nmap module to run this recipe. This can be installed by pip, as follows:

$ pip install python-nmap

How to do it...

We can create a socket object and get the IP address of that interface. Then, we can use any of the scanning techniques to probe the interface status.

Listing 3.6 shows the detect network interface...