Articles tagged #ffi

What's next? Well... poppler is the library Inkscape uses to import PDFs.

Alright. ALRIGHT. I know, we're all excited, but let's think about what we're doing again.

So we've managed to look at real network traffic and parse it completely. We've also taken some ICMP packets, parsed them, and then serialized them right back and we got the exact same result.

Okay, I lied.

I'm deciding - right this instant - that using wmic is cheating too. Oh, it was fair game when we were learning about Windows, but we're past that now.

We've just spent a lot of time abstracting over LoadLibrary, but we still have all the gory details of the Win32 ICMP API straight in our main.rs file! That won't do.

It's refactor time!

Our complete program is now about a hundred lines, counting blank lines (see the end of part 3 for a complete listing).

It's time to make sup, our own take on ping, use the Win32 APIs to send an ICMP echo. Earlier we discovered that Windows's ping.exe used IcmpSendEcho2Ex. But for our purposes, the simpler IcmpSendEcho will do just fine.

So, how does ping.exe actually send a ping? It seems unrealistic that ping.exe itself implements all the protocols involved in sending a ping. So it must be calling some sort of library. Also, since it ends up talking to the outside world via a NIC (network interface controller), the kernel is probably involved at some point.