Reaching your Pi over your network

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There are multiple ways of learning what is the IP address your Raspberry Pi is obtaining from a
router. The most obvious one is to use the router's DHCP client list. Another one is to use a HDMI display as your RPi will report its IP address while booting.

The former requires administrative access to the router, which may not be possible on certain networks and the latter is only possible if you can connect the display to the RPi and you have a display available. What I am going to propose requires no special rights over the network gear not any additional hardware.

One of the things you can do over a network is to broadcast a message (in fact this is the foundation of the DHCP protocol for a computer to find a suitable DHCP sever over the network without previous knowledge of it). Sending a UDP broadcast message allows any other system on the network to hear it. And if that message is received each receiver knows immediately the sender's IP address.

So here is what I do to perform this periodic broadcast from the RPi


from socket import * 
from time import sleep

s=socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM)
s.setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_BROADCAST, 1)
while (1) :
    s.sendto("Hello\n", ("255.255.255.255",25555))
    sleep(2)
Any computer on the network can tell the IP address of the sender of this special message so it will effectively learn about it. I tried to use the netcat command but while it works it fails to shown the sender's address so I used tcpdump instead. 

sudo tcpdump -i en0 port 25555
That did it for me. Once I learn my RPi address on a network I can go ahead and ssh to it for any maintenance task I want. My main interest here is for nodes that are installed on networks different than my home network.

Comments

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10:52 am
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