Book Image

Python Network Programming Cookbook

By : Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker
Book Image

Python Network Programming Cookbook

By: Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Overview of this book

<p>Python is an excellent language to use to write code and have fun by prototyping applications quickly. The presence of lots of third-party libraries, also known as batteries, makes it even more easier and faster to prototype an application or to implement a new algorithm. If you are interested in creating the building blocks for many practical web and networking applications that rely on networking protocols then this book is a must-have.<br /><br />This book highlights major aspects of network programming in Python starting from writing simple networking clients, to developing complex screen-scraping and network security monitoring scripts. It creates the building blocks for many practical web and networking applications that rely on various networking protocols. This book presents the power and beauty of Python in solving the numerous real-world tasks in the area of network programming, system and network administration, network monitoring, and web-application development. <br /><br />This book develops your ability to solve a wide range of network programming tasks in Python. We will start by exploring the Python standard library functions to create client/server network and manipulate your local networking resources available under both IPv4 and IPv6. The practical focus continues with creating web and email clients, scraping web pages, fetching information from various websites, and searching for information on the Web such as Amazon, Flickr, and other sites. It further develops your skills to analyze your network security vulnerabilities using advanced network packet capture and analysis techniques.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Python Network Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Detecting inactive machines on your network


If you have been given a list of IP addresses of a few machines on your network and you are asked to write a script to find out which hosts are inactive periodically, you would want to create a network scanner type program without installing anything on the target host computers.

Getting ready

This recipe requires installing the Scapy library (> 2.2), which can be obtained at http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/files/scapy-latest.zip.

How to do it...

We can use Scapy, a mature network-analyzing, third-party library, to launch an ICMP scan. Since we would like to do it periodically, we need Python's sched module to schedule the scanning tasks.

Listing 3.7 shows us how to detect inactive machines, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter – 3
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications.
# This recipe requires scapy-2.2.0 or higher 

import argparse...