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umop
Asked: 2012-06-23 12:19:46 +0800 CST

Get the interface and ip address used to connect to a specific host (ip)

  • 772

I'm sure this has been asked and answered before, but I wasn't able to find it, so hopefully this will at least link someone to the right place.

I want to find out my local interface and ip address used to reach a certain host. For instance, if I had 3 adapters connected to my box and they all three went to different networks, I'd like to know which of the three (specifically, its ip address) is used to reach my.local.intranet (in this case, it would be a vpn tunnel interface). I suspect this is a job for ifconfig or traceroute, but I haven't been able to find the correct switches.

I'm running OSX 10.7 (Darwin)

EDIT: For easy access, This is what I ended up writing to get the trick done:

ifconfig `route get <host> | grep "interface: " | sed "s/[^:]*: \(.*\)/\1/"` | grep "inet " | sed "s/.*inet \([0-9.]*\) .*/\1/"

Any improvements / optimizations are welcome.

mac-osx ip-address interface ifconfig osx-lion

4 Answers

  1. route -n get www.yahoo.com

    I am running os x 10.6.8

    • 16
  2. Best Answer

    You can try "route" to print you're routing table which will show you the destination networks and gateways for your various interfaces.

    If the IP addresses don't help you determine the interface easily, run "traceroute," after running route, look at the first hop and compare it with the associated gateways from "route," and voila - that's your interface.

    #route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
145.67.4.0      switch47        255.255.255.0     U     0      0      eth0
192.168.1.0     localrouter     255.255.255.0     U     0      0      eth1

#traceroute <destination>
1    switch47.ba.foo.com   (145.67.4.1)    0.5 ms  .....
2    xxxxx.xxx.xxxx        (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)   0.Xms. ...
    • 7

  3. You can use ip route get to find and output the route which would be used for a specified destination. The output should include the interface and source address.

    % ip route get 8.8.8.8
8.8.8.8 via 172.16.4.1 dev eth1  src 172.16.4.36
    • 5

  4. I'm not sure if this is correct, but netstat might do it. It shows local address of established connections.

    # netstat -nt
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State      
...
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.61:44114      64.34.119.101:80        ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 192.168.1.61:36036      107.21.205.201:80       ESTABLISHED
    • 1