[libvirt] RFC: Implement virDomainGetIPAddress()

[Matthias Bolte]

2011/7/14 Michal Novotny <minovotn at redhat.com>:
> Hi guys,
> some time ago I've been investigating the options to get the guest's IP
> address information without having to connect to guest's VNC window or
> console. It was for one project I've been working on and I found that
> the solution lies in the procfs, precisely in the /proc/{PID}/net/arp...
>
> The format is as follows:
>
> $ cat /proc/{PID}/net/arp
> IP address       HW type     Flags       HW address            Mask
> Device
> 192.168.122.36   0x1         0x2         52:54:00:35:76:e6     *
> virbr0
>
> where the HW address matches the MAC address associated to the guest's
> NIC. Implementing such an API shouldn't be a big problem however I know
> that there's some option to run libvirt on Windows machines. It should
> be just the client so it shouldn't really matter however I'd like to ask
> you whether it's really not an issue.

Windows or not is irrelevant here as the IP address lookup cannot be
implemented in a general way/place, but will have to be implemented by
the hypervisor/network drivers.

> The function should return a string of the guest's IP address as read
> from the procfs or return a NULL value if there's no IP address
> associated with the guest.
>
> If the multiple NICs are being used by the guest then the function
> should return either the IP address matching the MAC address passed to
> the function or the first IP address if omitted.
>
> The prototype should be:
>
> char *virDomainGetIPAddress(virDomainPtr domain, char *devmac);

First of all you're missing the unsigned int flags parameter.

Also did you consider that the MAC to IP(v4|v6) mapping isn't
necessarily a 1:1 mapping, but the signature of your function requires
this?

-- 
Matthias Bolte
http://photron.blogspot.com