We can create a socket object and get the IP address of that interface. Then, we can use any of the scanning techniques to probe the interface status.

Listing 3.6 shows the detect network interface status, as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition -- Chapter - 3 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
 
 
import argparse 
import socket 
import struct 
import fcntl 
import nmap 
 
SAMPLE_PORTS = '21-23' 
 
def get_interface_status(ifname): 
    sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) 
    ip_address = socket.inet_ntoa(fcntl.ioctl( 
        sock.fileno(), 
        0x8915, #SIOCGIFADDR, C socket library sockios.h 
        struct.pack(b'256s', bytes(ifname[:15], 'utf-8')) 
    )[20:24]) 
    nm = nmap.PortScanner()          
    nm.scan(ip_address, SAMPLE_PORTS)       
    return nm[ip_address].state()           
     
if  __name__ == '__main__': 
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Python 
                                       networking utils') 
    parser.add_argument('--ifname', action="store", dest="ifname",
                          required=True) 
    given_args = parser.parse_args()  
    ifname = given_args.ifname     
    print ("Interface [%s] is: %s" %(ifname, get_interface_status(ifname)))        
       

If you run this script to inquire the status of the eth0 status, it will show something similar to the following output:

$ python 3_6_find_network_interface_status.py --ifname=lo 
Interface [lo] is: up