Find the ip address of a remote object in .net remoting

Question

I have a client-server application that uses .net remoting. The clients are in a LAN and i do not know their location in advance.

Sometimes we do file transfers and as an optimization I want to determine if a client is in fact on the same machine as the server (it is quite possible). In this case, I only need to do a File.Copy.

Let's say that a client calls the remote method:

RemoteFile server.GetFile(string path);

how can I determine if the client (the requester) is on the same machine?

Answer 1

If you know the IP Address for the server you're calling the remote method from you can use this method to tell whether or not you're on the same machine:

using System.Net;

private bool CheckIfServer(IPAddress serverIP)
{
    // Get all addresses assigned to this machine
    List<IPAddress> ipAddresses = new List<IPAddress>();
    ipAddresses.AddRange(Dns.GetHostAddresses(Dns.GetHostName()));

    // If desirable, also include the loopback adapter
    ipAddresses.Add(IPAddress.Loopback);

    // Detect if this machine contains the IP for the remote server
    // Note: This uses a Lambda Expression, which is only available .Net 3 or later
    return ipAddresses.Exists(i => i.ToString() == serverIP.ToString());
}

If you don't know the IPAddress for your remote server you can easily get it using the server's host name like this:

Dns.GetHostAddresses("remote_host_address")

This returns an IPAddress[], which includes all the resolved address for that host.