Where are you ...

Some times you just can't find your servers or other devices. Working on different networks with a lot of VLAN's it's complicated and you start to forget on what network you are and where are the servers located. Many networks have some rules where things are to help. But I have one system and then someone else's may differ substantially. That leads sometimes to me feeling lost. My goto tool on Kali Linux is NetDiscover.

I've been working / testing a PXE system and an Portainer installation on a my home network and got int some problems. (For posts to come)

If you have only 10 or 15 devices, this is really no big issue , but my network regularly reports hundreds of devices due to all of my VMs, containers, IoT devices, and so on. Enterprise networks are even worse, there has been so many people over the years setting them up that you usually feel lost for a while.

There are some terrific tools out there for finding IPs and identifying devices on your network and also the Router , DNS or DHCP are helpfull.

I use many tools but today it's about NetDiscover, a tool easy to install and use.

Installation

Most Linux distros, have NetDiscover. Today we use apt as my VM runs Ubuntu.

sudo apt install netdiscover -y

Usage

Once installed, you can start NetDiscover with many different flags. To discover your machines on the network do this sudo netdiscover -r 192.0.2.0/24

If you like to see when a server goes live use sudo netdiscover -p -r 192.0.2.0/24 when it's live it pops up on the list too.

Looking for a device on an unknown IP in an unknown subnet:
sudo netdiscover -S -f -i enp0s18

For quick help netdiscover -help

You can find your NIC by see your Connection Information or with ip a show

NetDiscover Homepage and on GitHub. See also Kali Linux