Promiscuous Mode

[Pete Kelly]

Hello there...

Is there a simple way to tell whether a network card is running in promiscuous mode?

[Nicolas Dumeige]

Hello,

Set the network card in promiscuous mode makes an entry in the syslog, doesn't it ?
If so, use dmesg to grep that entry.

But there must be a direct way for sure.

My 0,02 cents

Nicolas

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

On few UNIXes, you could use ifstatus command. But it is not available for HP. You may have to get the source code and compile it for HP-UX.

-Sri

[Brian Hackley · Accepted solution]

Hello,

HP Support has a tool called "lanshow" that will tell you if the card is in promiscuous mode when you run lanshow -f and pick thru the volumnous output.

I don't know of a user-level method of checking for promiscuous mode in use. Promiscuous mode cannot be enabled from an command level prompt or HPUX OS command option.

However, the "pcap" library puts the card into promiscuous mode. It used by tcpdump and ethereal, all of which are supplied with the HPUX Internet Express package from http://software.hp.com.

You could also search for, or write a DLPI program to query the status of the card if you wish. See the DLPI Programmer's Guide at http://docs.hp.com . Some DLPI examples are in /usr/lib/demos/networking/dlpi

Hope that helps,
-> Brian Hackley

[Andrew Cowan]

The open-source tool has all kinds of utilities that set cards into promiscuous mode, so its logical to assume hey also have a way of detecting it too?

[Pete Kelly]

Many thanks for the asnwers here, I've assigned points accordingly.

Brian - Just the answer I wanted to see - Cheers

[Pete Kelly]

Just performing general house-keeping - Thought I'd close this thread