Retrieve computer name

Question

I am building a website for a company who has a software that gets registered to the computer, and uses the computer name and user name of the pc. How can I retrieve those values without the user needing to fill it out?

I am using codeigniter if that helps any

Answer 1

You can't. All PHP will ever see of the user's machine is the IP address, from which you MAY be able to do a reverse lookup and get a hostname. But this hostname is not likely to be the actual machine's name. Ditto for the user's client-side username. A website has no business knowing how a user logged into their local machine.

Answer 2

If everything happens on the same local network, you could use the server machine to lookup the mac address corresponding to the IP of the visitor with something like that:

/**
 * Returns MAC-address (Ethernet 2-level in OSI model address)
 * @param string $ip Address to search MAC for. If not set, IP-address from constructor'll be used
 * @return mixed
 */
public function getMAC($ip=null)
{
    if((!$ip && !$this->sCurrentIP) || !$this->_arp_allowed())
    {
        return null;
    }
    $ip=$ip?$ip:$this->sCurrentIP;
    $rgMatches=array();
    if(PHP_OS=='WINNT')
    {
       exec("arp -a", $rgResult);
       $sMacTemplate="/[\d|A-F]{2}\-[\d|A-F]{2}\-[\d|A-F]{2}\-[\d|A-F]{2}\-[\d|A-F]{2}\-[\d|A-F]{2}/i";
       foreach($rgResult as $key=>$value)
       {
          if (strpos($value, $ip)!==FALSE)
          {
             preg_match($sMacTemplate, $value, $rgMatches);
             break;
          }
       };
    }
    else
    {
       exec("arp -a | grep $ip", $rgResult);
       if(count($rgResult))
       {
           $sMacTemplate="/[\d|A-F]{2}\:[\d|A-F]{2}\:[\d|A-F]{2}\:[\d|A-F]{2}\:[\d|A-F]{2}\:[\d|A-F]{2}/i";
           preg_match($sMacTemplate, $rgResult[0], $rgMatches);
       }
    }
    return count($rgMatches)?$rgMatches[0]:null;
}