Good Cross Platform Way To Communicate With The NIC

[James Parsons]

I am planning to write an Ethernet API, but I need a way to do each of the following:

1. Ask The NIC For The MAC Address.
2. Ask The NIC For Collision Information.
3. Find Out If We Are Running Ethernet II or IEEE Ethernet(802.3 & 802.2)
4. Send A Constructed Ethernet Frame Based On The Ethernet Impl.(see #3)

Hopefully, I can get a cross platform way of doing this, seeeming as the API will be for Python. If anyone knows a simple way of accomplishing this, please help me out.

[James Parsons]

Please, can someone help me !!!!!!?????

[ResidentBiscuit]

Check out this: http://www.slideshare.net/victor1tnet/scapy-communication-on-layer2

I don't believe it's communicating directly with layer 2, though. That's generally handled almost entirely within hardware. I think this is just doing some clever packet crafting (layer 3 and up).

You can retrieve a ton of information via SNMP as well. But that's assuming SNMP is running on the target device.