Get information about the installed network adapters

Question

I am using Delphi XE2 Update 4 on Windows XP sp3

I am looking to get max possible information from installed network adapters, specially the broadcast ip.

Fo

Answer 1

For what its worth, if you need the broadcast IP for a specific adapter, you can use SIO_GET_BROADCAST_ADDRESS instead.

With that said, a non-Winsock solution would be to use GetAdaptersInfo() or GetAdaptersAddresses() instead. This way, you don't have to create a SOCKET to get the info, you can enumerate both IPv4 and IPv6 adapters at the same time, as well as other adapters that Winsock does not recognize.

For GetAdaptersInfo(), the IP_ADAPTER_INFO.IpAddressList list contains IPv4 IPs and Subnet masks (on XP+, uni-directional adapters are included in the output, but you can use GetUniDirectionalAdapterInfo() to filter them out).

For GetAdaptersAddresses(), the IP_ADAPTER_ADDRESSES.FirstUnicastAddress list contains both IPv4 and IPv6 IPs, and IPv4 Subnet masks on Vista+. For XP and earlier, you can use GetIpAddrTable() to retrieve IPv4 Subnet masks and match them to the IPv4 IPs from GetAdaptersAddresses().

Once you have an IPv4 IP and Subnet mask, calculating its Broadcast IP is very simple:

BroadcastIP := (IP and SubnetMask) or (not SubnetMask);