gen_udp:connect/3

[Jayson Vantuyl]

Dear Erlangers,

Is this call guaranteed to be stable?

I have a unique problem.  My application is going to be deployed in a range of environments where it is not trivial to know what your IP address is.  It's also critical that I determine the address without generating traffic and in a way that gets its local address, not the address that might be assigned by NAT.  That's largely because its IP address is being used to detect NAT, so I can't just ask a public server.

It turns out that this is a fairly open problem in with sockets, especially if DNS isn't configured just right.

The best option I've found is opening a UDP socket, connecting it to some presumably non-local address, and then asking what the source socket is.  In the Erlang shell, this looks something like this:

> Erlang R13B (erts-5.7.1) [source] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [hipe] [kernel-poll:false]
> 
> Eshell V5.7.1  (abort with ^G)
> 1> {ok,U} = gen_udp:open(0).
> {ok,#Port<0.435>}
> 2> gen_udp:connect(U,"1.2.3.4",1234).
> ok
> 3> inet:sockname(U).
> {ok,{{192,168,3,239},59163}}
> 4> 

The catch is that gen_udp:connect/3 isn't documented.  Is there some guarantee that this API will be supported (and hopefully someday documented)?

Also, does anybody have any idea if this works well across Windows versions?

Thanks,

-- 
Jayson Vantuyl
kagato@REDACTED