macos - Finding DNS server settings programmatically on Mac OS X

Question

I have some cross platform DNS client code that I use for doing end to end SMTP and on windows I can find the current DNS server ip addresses by looking in the registry. On the Mac I can probably use the SystemConfiguration framework as mentioned in the first answer, however the exact method of doing so is not immediately obvious.

For instance SCDynamicStoreCopyDHCPInfo returns some of the dynamic DHCP related data but not the DNS server addresses.

Answer 1

I know it's been a long time since you needed this, but there is nothing worse than a old unsolved answer. You can't access them from "/etc/resolv.conf" because of permission issues. After much searching, and a little luck I discovered you can get it via res_ninit() function.

// Get native iOS System Resolvers
res_ninit(&_res);
res_state res = &_res;

for (int i = 0; i < res->nscount; i++) {
  sa_family_t family = res->nsaddr_list[i].sin_family;
  int port = ntohs(res->nsaddr_list[i].sin_port);
  if (family == AF_INET) { // IPV4 address
    char str[INET_ADDRSTRLEN]; // String representation of address
    inet_ntop(AF_INET, & (res->nsaddr_list[i].sin_addr.s_addr), str, INET_ADDRSTRLEN);
  } else if (family == AF_INET6) { // IPV6 address
    char str[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN]; // String representation of address
    inet_ntop(AF_INET6, &(res->nsaddr_list [i].sin_addr.s_addr), str, INET6_ADDRSTRLEN);
  }
}
res_ndestroy(res);