amos loves to tinker

When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how...

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...

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...

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).

While this is pretty good for...

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....

Our ping API is simple, but it’s also very limited:

pub fn ping(dest: ipv4::Addr) -> Result<(), String>

// called as:
ping(ipv4::Addr([8, 8, 8, 8])).unwrap();...

Let’s set aside our sup project for a while.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s a perfectly fine project, and, were we simply rewriting “ping” for Windows...

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....

Now that we’ve found the best way to find the “default network interface”… what can we do with that interface?

Well, listen for network traffic of...

Before we move on to parsing more of our raw packets, I want to take some time to improve our error handling strategy.

Currently, the ersatz codebase contains a mix of...

Hello and welcome to Part 11 of this series, wherein we finally use some of the code I prototyped way back when I was planning this series.

Where are we standing?

Let’s...