cc @alexbrainman @mattn @zx2c4

On my box net.InterfaceByIndex(5), for example returns a Interface.Name "Ethernet" and what I need for pcap.OpenLive() is "\Device\NPF_{13044533-0543-4AF5-9E3C-85EBBC7C04BB}"

Current implementation of net package have some differences for Name field.

Linux, BSD, AIX: interface name like "eth0"
Windows: Friendly Name like "Ethernet1"
Plan9: path to the device like "/net/ipifc/1"

On Windows, the path prefiexed with \Device\NPF_ is device volume. This is not interface name.

To get device volume, you need to call SetupDiGetDeviceInterfaceDetail.

I suggest to add new field Device to be set identity of the interface.

FWIW, I'll probably upstream WireGuard's Windows networking wrappers to x/sys or x/net somewhat soon. It does all the things:

https://godoc.org/golang.zx2c4.com/wireguard/windows/tunnel/winipcfg

On my box net.InterfaceByIndex(5), for example returns a Interface.Name "Ethernet" and what I need for pcap.OpenLive() is "\Device\NPF_{13044533-0543-4AF5-9E3C-85EBBC7C04BB}"

Current implementation of net package have some differences for Name field.

Linux, BSD, AIX: interface name like "eth0"
Windows: Friendly Name like "Ethernet1"
Plan9: path to the device like "/net/ipifc/1"

On Windows, the path prefiexed with \Device\NPF_ is device volume. This is not interface name.

To get device volume, you need to call SetupDiGetDeviceInterfaceDetail.

I suggest to add new field Device to be set identity of the interface.

I like this idea. If .Name was meant to be a friendly/display name, a separate .Device value that would give us what we tend to need to "act on" a device would be great. It would be good to not have to start writing "am I running in Windows" code, and there is no doubt code in production that is using this to display device names. This is a good common ground approach.

Libpcap's pcap_findalldevs() API currently provides, for each device, a name value that is the name to use when opening the device and a description value that's a human-readable description of some sort.

On most UN*Xes, the description is usually non-existent.

On Windows, it's either a hardware description or something extraordinarily useful and precisely descriptive such as "Microsoft".

That needs to be redone.

Wireshark works around this by using, for its description, a string intended for human consumption, fetched by various platform-dependent mechanisms. On Windows, it fetches the "friendly name", which might be "Local Area Connection 17" or might be "Ethernet0" or whatever.

See capture/capture_win_ifnames.c in the Wireshark for an example of how to fetch the "friendly name" for an interface, given its GUID (which is the ugly blob in the name value), on Windows.

It would probably be wisest to name Name always be the name used to open it, so that it'd be "\Device\NPF_{ugly GUID blob}" on Windows. If a device has no description, as is likely to be the case on UN*Xes, using the interface name would be a workaround, for the benefit of programs that want to let the user choose from a list of names - they'd show the description and use the name corresponding to that description.

(For extra credit, get friendly names on macOS using the code in add_unix_interface_ifinfo() in in capture/capture-pcap-util.c.)