inet:getiflist() behaviour in Windows

[David Hopwood]

Per Hedeland wrote:
> Windows gurus, do interfaces in Windows actually have names, that can be
> used for something (programmatically)?

Sort of, almost. There are names for "Network connections" -- see the
NetConnectionID property of Win32_NetworkAdapter:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/win32_networkadapter.asp>
But note that:

  - the NetConnectionID property was only added in XP, and hardly anything
    uses it.
  - a network connection is not quite the same thing as an interface, for
    example the loopback interface is not a network connection.
  - the user can arbitrarily rename network connections, i.e. they are
    user-oriented names rather than stable identifiers.

The usual method of enumerating interfaces is the SIO_GET_INTERFACE_LIST
ioctl, which doesn't involve names.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>