Trying to discover iOS devices on my network using python script
Trying to use pybonjour but not sure if it is what I need. https://code.google.com/p/pybonjour/
I want to be able to discover iOS devices that appear on my network automatically, will be running a script later on based on this, but first I want to just discover a iOS devices as soon as it appear/disappears on my wifi network.
So the question, how do I do this? running on a windows machine with python27 and the pybonjour package installed, the two examples work from the pybonjour page, but what command do I run to discover iOS devices using the scripts included on my network? or will this only discovery services running on my pc that i run this script on!
If I am going in the wrong direction please let me know, I can't seem to find the documentation on this package!
python browse_and_resolve.py xxxxxx
Thx Matt.
Update...
This article and the browser was helpful, http://marknelson.us/2011/10/25/dns-service-discovery-on-windows/ in finding the services I needed to search for.
example; (this discovered my apple tv's, not at home atm so can't check what the iphone is called! I assume iphone!
python browse_and_resolve.py _appletv._tcp
Also if you have the windows utility dns-sd.exe this will search for all the services available on the network. I used this to find what I was looking for.
dns-sd -B _services._dns-sd._udp
Update...
"Bonjour is used in two ways: - publishing a service - detecting (browsing for) available services".
For what I want to do, I don't think it will work as the ipad/iPhone won't advertise a service unless I'm running a app that advertise one (or jailbreak my iPhone/ipad and then ssh will be open). Any more ideas?
Answer
What you're trying to do (a) probably can't be done, and (b) probably wouldn't be much use if it could.
The point of Bonjour is to discover services, not devices. Of course each service is provided by some device, so indirectly you can discover devices with it… but only by discovering a service that they're advertising.
As far as I know, (except Apple TVs) don't advertise any services, except while you're running an app that uses Bonjour to find the same app on other machines. (Except for jailbroken devices, which often advertise SSH, AFP, etc.)
There are a few ways to, indirectly, get a list of all services being advertised by anyone on the network. The simplest is probably to use Bonjour Browser for Windows. (I've never actually used it, but the original Mac tool and the Java port, both of which I have used, both suggest this Windows port for Windows users.) Fire it up and you'll get a list of services, and you can click on each one to get the details.
So, you can verify that your iPhone and iPad aren't advertising any services, which will show that there is no way to detect them via Bonjour.
Meanwhile, even if you did find a device, what are you planning to do? Presumably you want to communicate with the device in some way, right? Whatever service you're trying to communicate with… just browse for that service—and then, if appropriate, filter down to iOS devices. That's got to be easier than browsing for iOS devices and then filtering down to those that have the service you want.
As for whether there's any way to detect iOS devices… Well, there are at least two possibilities. I don't know if either of them will work, but…
First, even if the iOS device isn't advertising anything for you, I assume it's browsing for services you can advertise. How else does it find that there's an Apple TV to AirTunes to, an iTunes on the LAN to sync with, etc.?
So, use Bonjour Browser to get a list of all services your iTunes-running desktop, Apple TV, etc. are advertising. Then turn off all the services on your desktop, use PyBonjour to advertise whichever services seem plausibly relevant (and, if need be, use netcat to put trivial listeners on the ports you advertise). Then turn on your iPhone, and see if it connects to any of them. You may want to leave it running for a while, or switch WiFi off and back on. (I'm guessing that, despite Apple's recommendations, it doesn't browse continuously for most services, but just checks every once in a while and/or every time its network status changes. After all, Apple's recommendations are for foreground interactive apps, not background services.)
Unfortunately, even if you can find a service that all iOS devices will connect to, you may not be able to distinguish iOS devices from others just by getting connections there. For example, I'm pretty sure any Mac or Windows box running iTunes will hit up your fake AirTunes service, and any Mac will hit your AirPrint, and so on. So, how do you distinguish that from an iPhone hitting it? You may need to actually serve enough of the protocol to get information out of them. Which will be particularly difficult for Apple's undocumented protocols.
But hopefully you'll get lucky, and there will be something that all iOS devices, and nothing else, will want to talk to. iTunes Sync seems like the obvious possibility.
Alternatively, there are a few things they have to broadcast, or they just wouldn't work. You can't get on a WiFi network without broadcasts. And most home WiFi networks use DHCP, which means they have to broadcast DHCP discover (and request), as well. There may be some kind of heuristic signature you can detect in these messages. If nothing else, enabling DDNS should cause the device to send its hostname, and you can guess based on that (e.g., unless you change the defaults, hostname.lower().endswith('iphone')).
The easiest way is probably to set up your desktop as the main access point for your home network. I believe it's as simple as turning on Internet Connection Sharing somewhere in the control panel. (Setting up as a DHCP relay agent is much less overhead than being a full router, but I have no idea how you'd even get started doing that on Windows.) Then you can capture the DHCP broadcasts (or, failing that, the 802.11 broadcasts) as they come in. Wireshark will capture and parse the messages for you easily, so you can watch and see if it looks like this is worth pursuing farther. (See RFC 2131 for details on the format that aren't obvious from Wireshark's cryptic one-liner descriptions.)
You can take this even farther and watch the internet connections every host makes once they're connected to the internet. Any device that's periodically checking the App Store, the iOS upgrade server, etc.… Well, unless one of the jailbreak devteam guys lives in your house, that's probably an iPhone, right? The downside is that some of these checks may be very periodic, and detecting an iPhone 6 hours after it connects to your network isn't very exciting.