Twisted: source IP address for outbound connections

Question

I'm in the process of implementing a service -- written in Python with the Twisted framework, running on Debian GNU/Linux -- that checks the availability of SIP servers. For this I use the OPTIONS method (a SIP protocol feature), as this seems to be a commonplace practice. In order to construct correct and RFC compliant headers, I need to know the source IP address and the source port for the connection that is going to be established. [How] can this be done with Twisted?

This is what I tried: I subclassed protocol.DatagramProtocol and within startProtocol(self) I used self.transport.getHost().host and self.transport.getHost().port. The latter is indeed the port that's going to be used, whereas the former only yields 0.0.0.0.

I guess that at this point Twisted doesn't [yet?] know which interface and as such which source IP address will be used. Does Twisted provide a facility that could help me with this or do I need to interface with the OS (routing) in a different way? Or did I just use self.transport.getHost().host incorrectly?

Answer 1

For the sake of completeness I answer my own question:

Make sure you use connect() on the transport before trying to determine the host's source IP address. The following excerpt shows the relevant part of a protocol implementation:

class FooBarProtocol(protocol.DatagramProtocol):
    def startProtocol(self):
        self.transport.getHost().host   # => 0.0.0.0
        self.transport.connect(self.dstHost, self.dstPort)
        self.transport.getHost().host   # => 192.168.1.102