How to — Host Discovery
Host Discovery is a process of finding and enumerating hosts present in a network. This article intends to showcase several methods that would help in identifying the hosts present in a network.
We will be using 3 tools for doing Host Discovery:
- Netdiscover
- Nmap
- arp-scan
Netdiscover
The -r switch stands for range. So, within the mentioned range, Netdiscover would find hosts whose IP ranges between 192.168.169.0 to 192.168.169.255. If you are not sure about the range, I would suggest going and learning about CIDR and IP Addressing.
The output of the above command would be this:
Nmap
The -sn switch stands for Ping scan. Basically, Nmap will send ICMP packets to each IP that falls in the range 192.168.169.0 to 192.168.169.255, and whichever host is active and is present within this network range will reply back. This is how we understand the availability of the hosts within a network.
arp-scan
The localnet switch will scan for my current network configuration, like whether or not I am using Ethernet connectivity or Wi-Fi, and based on that it will check for my IP and the subnet mask and will create a range in which it will search for the hosts.
This was all from my side regarding Host Discovery. Hope you like it :)
Bye, see you guys next time…
