is there a good way to gather the mac addresses of machines on a local network using Python. If it helps I'm trying to execute this python script from the DHCP server for the network. I'm new to Python but would it be a bad idea to look at the DHCP leases file for this info? I'd like to use this inside a Django app eventually. Thanks.
The easiest thing to do would be to run a tool that can achieve this and parse its output (e.g. nmap). Depending on your needs, you could run it periodically and keep a file with the mac addresses.
Looking at the leases file could work, assuming that all your machines are in there. If you want to actively look for machines, do a nmap scan.
Really a unix question (one will assume)
You can either look at the arp addresses registered "/sbin/arp -a" or a DHCP lease table. If you go the arp route you will on find addresses that your system has recently received/sent packets to, the DHCP lease table will give you the ability to see everything. Though if it's static configured it won't show up.
Related
I want to make access from remote ubuntu server to local machine because I have multiple files in this machine and I want to transfer it periodically (every minute) to server how can I do that using python
Depending on your local machine OS and network setup, I would recommend the following:
File transfers
Based on the file size, if its a small copy, I would use scp (secure copy). This is because of the simplicity of the command.
In most use cases however I would use rsync because of its great capabilities, most importantly the ability to handle failed partial transfers. It works by analysing the differences between the source and destination. It has pretty much every preference under the sun available (overwriting, deltas, etc.)
Note that when using these commands in an automation script over a longer period of time, you'll probably want to set up a static IP or DDNS for your remote machine.
Python
To run shell commands in a Python script, use pexpect. Its built around the original C based expect and it's fantastic. I used it the other day to transfer a folder from a dev computer to a number of different Raspberry Pis remotely at the same time. Check out the documentation here: https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
Automation
As for automation, it really depends on how you want it set up. If you want the python script responsible for transferring data to be called when you want to transfer data you could look into crontab. It's very well known by admins so easy to Google.
Alternatively, if this is part of a Python app you could have the app running in the background and sleeping (time.sleep() or a time elapsed function to check) between transfers. If you needed to do other things in the same Python app then you could stick the whole transfer and sleep part into a thread (also easily implemented in Python).
I hope this helps, let me know if you want details elaborated.
You can easily transfer files between local and remote or between two remote servers. If both servers are Linux-based and require to transfer multiple files and folder using single command, however, you need to follow up below steps:
User from one remote server should have access to another remote server to corresponding directory you want to transfer the file.
You might need to create a policy or group and assign to server list to that group
which you want to access and assign the user to that group so 2 different remote
server can talk to each other.
Run the following scp command:-
scp [options] username1#source_host:directory1/filename1
username2#destination_host:directory2/filename2
I have to write some specific automated tests using Python that should block all outbound traffic to a certain host or ip range. On windows I achieved this via the windows hosts file and the effect is the desired one but on Mac OSX this does not work as somehow the hosts file is ignored.
How could I do this programmatically? Netfilter but the lack of documentation and examples is keeping me from using it. Could anyone give me an idea? for example how i could block access to google.com
I'm writing a Python script to access all computers on the network, log in to them and read some log files. I don't want to use something as low-level as socket, but I can if I must. I realize that my problem is similar to this question, but not the same.
Are there any modules for accessing external Windows machines?
Has anyone done anything like this before?
I'm specifically looking to log into Windows 7 machines, not unix.
Let's also assume that each computer I want to log into has Remote Desktop installed and enabled. I'm also not worried about network security or encryption because these files are not confidential. Windows machines don't have SSH installed on the by default do they?
There has to be something on the other side for you to talk to. This limits you to either setting up a "server" on each machine, installing a real server (i.e. sshd), building a "server" yourself and installing it, or using a built in and active feature of the OS.
Based upon this, what kind of system do you want to set up on these machines? What does it need to do? Just read the contents of a prespecified file list? Will that list change?
One solution is to turn on telnet, and use paramiko or twisted to
talk across it. This isn't very secure of course
Next up, set up a samba share, and access the folder remotely. This
is also insecure, though less so than telnet
You could find a ssh daemon port and run that, if you are so inclined
Psexec from sysinternals might work
Use twisted to build a server app with the features you need
Use ncat to listen on a port and spawn a cmd prompt
Be aware that most of the solutions for accessing windows remotely are... poor. The best solution is probably to roll your own, but that is hard work and you will probably make mistakes.
Also, Windows 7 is not exactly multi-user friendly. Individual processes can run as separate users, but the OS does not support having multiple users logged in at the same time. Someone is going to be the "user" and everyone else is just a process with a different credential set.
This is more an artificial limitation on M$'s part than anything technical. To see this in action, try to log in with RDP while a user is logged in locally. Fun times.
Per your edit, the easiest thing to do is just set up a samba share on the box.
After this share is set up:
with open(r'\\myCompNameOrIP\C\windows\logs\logfile.txt','rb') as logfile:
loglines = logfile.readlines()
Or you can use the gencat sample found here. Just give it r'\\myCompNameOrIP\C\windows\logs\*.txt' as the search path and watch the magic.
From Ubuntu I use samba:
In Bash:
gvfs-mount smb://them/folder
Here I give name, domain and password
Then in python:
folder = '/home/me/.gvfs/folder on them'
using the os module I read folders and files inside.
I am working in a small business environment.
Why not have each of the computers send the log file to the central computer?
I'm writing a Python script which connects to remote hosts over a (super complicated) SOCKS/SSL tunnel. I am able to establish connections to IPs in a remote intranet on any port.
What I'm hoping to do is set up this python script to use IP addresses in the local loopback range (127.0.x.x) to become (maybe with the help of the hosts file) a 'replica' of the remote systems, and hence enable me to use applications which don't support proxies. The problem is that I don't always know what ports they're trying to connect to. It seems the only way to work this out is to bind sockets to all 65536 ports, which seems a little crazy. So two questions:
Is it crazy? Can I just set up a python list of sockets from 1-65536?
Or is there a better way I should be doing this? Can I monitor connections to an IP somehow and bind the ports just before they're needed?
I want to avoid using too much platform-dependent or non-python code if possible.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm only writing the client here - I have no control over the server. Believe me, if I had control over the server side of it I would not be doing it with SOCKS/SSL/CRAM :)
What about going lower level and interfacing a library designed for network analyzers like pycap?
This way you could detect all connection attempts and find the ports that you need to expose or may be you can just route the packets directly assuming the library in addition to packet detection can also do packet injection (pypcap page says this feature is experimental).
This would IMO make sense in python only for slow applications however...
Pycap seems to be developed for linux, but the core capturing is done by libpcap and for windows there is a similar library winpcap.
Matt,
If using windows your best shot is something like OpenVPN over the tunnel. OpenVPN requires only one TCP port/stream and gives you a pair of virtual interfaces with full connectivity.
[updated]
It may be possible using a TUN/TAP driver on the client side. See this unix version for ideas.
I'd like to search for a given MAC address on my network, all from within a Python script. I already have a map of all the active IP addresses in the network but I cannot figure out how to glean the MAC address. Any ideas?
You need ARP. Python's standard library doesn't include any code for that, so you either need to call an external program (your OS may have an 'arp' utility) or you need to build the packets yourself (possibly with a tool like Scapy.
I don't think there is a built in way to get it from Python itself.
My question is, how are you getting the IP information from your network?
To get it from your local machine you could parse ifconfig (unix) or ipconfig (windows) with little difficulty.
If you want a pure Python solution, you can take a look at Scapy to craft packets (you need to send ARP request, and inspect replies). Or if you don't mind invoking external program, you can use arping (on Un*x systems, I don't know of a Windows equivalent).
It seems that there is not a native way of doing this with Python. Your best bet would be to parse the output of "ipconfig /all" on Windows, or "ifconfig" on Linux. Consider using os.popen() with some regexps.
Depends on your platform. If you're using *nix, you can use the 'arp' command to look up the mac address for a given IP (assuming IPv4) address. If that doesn't work, you could ping the address and then look, or if you have access to the raw network (using BPF or some other mechanism), you could send your own ARP packets (but that is probably overkill).
You would want to parse the output of 'arp', but the kernel ARP cache will only contain those IP address(es) if those hosts have communicated with the host where the Python script is running.
ifconfig can be used to display the MAC addresses of local interfaces, but not those on the LAN.
Mark Pilgrim describes how to do this on Windows for the current machine with the Netbios module here. You can get the Netbios module as part of the Win32 package available at python.org. Unfortunately at the moment I cannot find the docs on the module.
as python was not meant to deal with OS-specific issues (it's supposed to be interpreted and cross platform), i would execute an external command to do so:
in unix the command is ifconfig
if you execute it as a pipe you get the desired result:
import os
myPipe = os.popen2("/sbin/ifconfig","a")
print(myPipe[1].read())