I am looking for an easy way to convert a MAC address to the corresponding IP address in a local network. In my case, there are only two devices: a very normal PC (192.168.0.1) and a scientific instrument which has an arbitrary IP address (192.168.0.xxx) hard coded in its ROM. The PC and the instrument are directly connected over a UDP socket with a CAT5 cable.
I know the MAC address of the instrument, but please assume that its IP address is unknown. I would like to write a C/C++ application which talks with the instrument using a socket connection. But I need to know the IP address before opening a socket (WinSock on Windows, sys/socket on OS X and Linux).
Currently I use a very dirty way as shown below.
- Execute ping command
ping 192.168.0.2 (NOTE: the instrument does not respond to ping)
- Repeat this from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.255
- Execute
arp -a to print a list of IP and MAC addresses
- Find the known MAC address and the corresponding IP address from the list
I would like to know how to retrieve the IP address in a more sophisticated way. It will be very nice if I can use the same method on Mac, Linux and Windows machines.
As far as I know, I have to broadcast a ARP packet to the network in order to retrieve a MAC address from a known IP address. But I could not find a way to get an IP address from a MAC address.
There's no good, generic solution for this as it is the reverse of intended behavior. Lower level protocols are not supposed to need to be aware of higher layer ones, so operations at the MAC layer don't have any good way of finding out about IP addresses. And then you get into the situation you're in now. So you can either employ a hack like the code you already have, or you can tackle this from a different direction. Is there any non-code way to determine the IP address of the device before hand? Such as setting it explicitly or putting it in a configuration file for your app. Alternatively, can you have the device send out spurious ARP requests? The PC should update its ARP cache based off of incoming requests as well as responses to requests it made.
We had to do this a while back, but I don't think we got it working properly.
I don't have the API calls off-hand, but they're easy to find in the Windows API. That's what we used, so our solution wouldn't be portable to non-Windows systems.
In our case, we ran into the same hurdle--no easy translation. What we ended up having to do was get a list of all the NICs available, and then loop through each one trying to match our given MAC address against the MAC address obtained from the NIC structure.
Once we found a match, we looked up the IP address given to the NIC structure.
We kept on going to see if we found any other matches in order to log an error. It's a good thing we did, because I believe we did find it multiple times, and it wasn't due to a MAC address being cloned.
That's when we learned that this would be an even harder problem, and we decided to abandon the whole thing and stick to just IP addresses.
How about try the system command arp within c++
system("arp");
This gives you a IP-MAC translation table.
