How to get IP of all hosts in LAN?

Question

I need to list IP addresses of all connected hosts in my LAN. What is the simplest way to do this?

Answer 1

You'll have to do a ping sweep. There's a Ping class in the System.Net namespace. Example follows. Also this is only possible if your computers don't have firewalls running. If they've got a firewall enabled, there's no way to determine this information short of doing SNMP queries on your switches.

System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping p = new System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping();
System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingReply rep = p.Send("192.168.1.1");
if (rep.Status == System.Net.NetworkInformation.IPStatus.Success)
{
    //host is active
}

The other issue is to determine how large your network is. In most home situations, your network mask will be 24 bits. This means that its set to 255.255.255.0. If your gateway is 192.168.1.1, this means that valid addresses on your network will be 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254. Here's an IP Calculator to help. You'll have to loop through each address and ping the address using the Ping class and check the PingReply.

If you're just looking for the information and aren't concerned with how you get it, you can use NMap. The command would be as follows

nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24

EDIT:

As far as speed goes, since you're on a local network, you can cut down the timeout interval considerably as your machines shouldn't take more than 100 milliseconds to reply. You can also use SendAsync to ping them all in parallel. The following program will ping 254 address in under half a second.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net.NetworkInformation;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Net;
using System.Threading;
using System.Net.Sockets;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static CountdownEvent countdown;
        static int upCount = 0;
        static object lockObj = new object();
        const bool resolveNames = true;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            countdown = new CountdownEvent(1);
            Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
            sw.Start();
            string ipBase = "10.22.4.";
            for (int i = 1; i < 255; i++)
            {
                string ip = ipBase + i.ToString();

                Ping p = new Ping();
                p.PingCompleted += new PingCompletedEventHandler(p_PingCompleted);
                countdown.AddCount();
                p.SendAsync(ip, 100, ip);
            }
            countdown.Signal();
            countdown.Wait();
            sw.Stop();
            TimeSpan span = new TimeSpan(sw.ElapsedTicks);
            Console.WriteLine("Took {0} milliseconds. {1} hosts active.", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds, upCount);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static void p_PingCompleted(object sender, PingCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            string ip = (string)e.UserState;
            if (e.Reply != null && e.Reply.Status == IPStatus.Success)
            {
                if (resolveNames)
                {
                    string name;
                    try
                    {
                        IPHostEntry hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(ip);
                        name = hostEntry.HostName;
                    }
                    catch (SocketException ex)
                    {
                        name = "?";
                    }
                    Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1}) is up: ({2} ms)", ip, name, e.Reply.RoundtripTime);
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("{0} is up: ({1} ms)", ip, e.Reply.RoundtripTime);
                }
                lock(lockObj)
                {
                    upCount++;
                }
            }
            else if (e.Reply == null)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Pinging {0} failed. (Null Reply object?)", ip);
            }
            countdown.Signal();
        }
    }
}

EDIT: After some use of it myself, I modified the program to output a count of how many IPs responded. There's a const bool that if set to true, will cause the program resolve the host names of the IPs. This significantly slows down the scan, though. (under half a second to 16 seconds) Also found that if the IP address is incorrectly specified (made a typo myself), the reply object can be null, so I handled that.

Answer 2

You would need to build an address range (e.g. 192.168.0.1 - 192.168.255.254) and ping each of those addresses. If a response is received, then that host is active.

Asynchronous Ping Tutorial:

http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial234_Asynchronous-Ping-using-Csharp.html

However, some newer operating systems block ping requests (ICMP). This would need to be disabled in the firewall on each computer for you to receive a response.

Answer 3

Nazim was correct. And krowe2's reply is factually incorrect. Switches absolutely forward broadcast traffic. You can send a ping to the subnet's broadcast address under the following conditions.

1.a) You are on the same subnet.

1.b) the gateway allows for IP direct broadcast

2.a) The subnet is not part of a fabric network.

2.b) If the subnet is part of a fabric, broadcast traffic is allowed on the subnet.

In about 80% of networks (and about 99.99% of networks using 192.168.1.1 as a gateway) this will work. I'm a network engineer and I do this all the time. You CAN NOT rely on ICMP (ping) responses to validate the existence of a device on a network. The problem is that no device is required to listen to any traffic. Not ping, not SNMP, not NetBios. The only real way to be sure is to look at the ARP table.

You have to send out any kind of traffic to every IP in the subnet and look at your own ARP table. Because no device can get any traffic until resolve the MAC address of the IP on the local subnet. So before a device decides if it's going to listen to traffic or not, it has to respond to an ARP request. Your device then caches this in it's ARP table and can send frames with the right destination MAC to the other device. On a Windows PC, the command line command is 'arp -a'. Linux is 'arp -n' if I recall correctly.

Answer 4

You can do it all in managed code. I do it using System.DirectoryServices and System.Net. Basically I get the names of the local computers from DirectoryServices (handling domains and workgroups as I go) then get each host's IP addresses from System.Net.Dns. Here's everything packed into a handy class...

public class NetworkComputer {
    private string _domain;
    private string _name;
    private IPAddress[] _addresses = null;

    public string Domain { get { return _domain; } }
    public string Name { get { return _name; } }
    public IPAddress[] Addresses { get { return _addresses; } }

    private NetworkComputer(string domain, string name) {
        _domain = domain;
        _name = name;
        try { _addresses = Dns.GetHostAddresses(name); } catch { }
    }

    public static NetworkComputer[] GetLocalNetwork() {
        var list = new List<NetworkComputer>();
        using(var root = new DirectoryEntry("WinNT:")) {
            foreach(var _ in root.Children.OfType<DirectoryEntry>()) {
                switch(_.SchemaClassName) {
                    case "Computer":
                        list.Add(new NetworkComputer("", _.Name));
                        break;
                    case "Domain":
                        list.AddRange(_.Children.OfType<DirectoryEntry>().Where(__ => (__.SchemaClassName == "Computer")).Select(__ => new NetworkComputer(_.Name, __.Name)));
                        break;
                }
            }
        }
        return list.OrderBy(_ => _.Domain).ThenBy(_ => _.Name).ToArray();
    }
}

Then just call the static method to get an array of your LAN computers...

var localComputers = NetworkComputer.GetLocalNetwork();

Answer 5

You could ping the adress range and note if a host responded. Of course, this will require the host to respond to the ping packets.

Answer 6

namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
    class WifiInformation
    {
        static CountdownEvent countdown;
        static int upCount = 0;
        static object lockObj = new object();
        const bool resolveNames = true;

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string ipBase = getIPAddress();
            string[] ipParts = ipBase.Split('.');
            ipBase = ipParts[0] + "." + ipParts[1] + "." + ipParts[2] + ".";
            for (int i = 1; i < 255; i++)
            {
                string ip = ipBase + i.ToString();

                Ping p = new Ping();
                p.PingCompleted += new PingCompletedEventHandler(p_PingCompleted);
                p.SendAsync(ip, 100, ip);
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static void p_PingCompleted(object sender, PingCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            string ip = (string)e.UserState;
            if (e.Reply != null && e.Reply.Status == IPStatus.Success)
            {
                if (resolveNames)
                {
                    string name;
                    try
                    {
                        IPHostEntry hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(ip);
                        name = hostEntry.HostName;
                    }
                    catch (SocketException ex)
                    {
                        name = "?";
                    }
                    Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1}) is up: ({2} ms)", ip, name, e.Reply.RoundtripTime);
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("{0} is up: ({1} ms)", ip, e.Reply.RoundtripTime);
                }
                lock (lockObj)
                {
                    upCount++;
                }
            }
            else if (e.Reply == null)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Pinging {0} failed. (Null Reply object?)", ip);
            }
        }

        public static string getIPAddress()
        {
            IPHostEntry host;
            string localIP = "";
            host = Dns.GetHostEntry(Dns.GetHostName());
            foreach (IPAddress ip in host.AddressList)
            {
                if (ip.AddressFamily == AddressFamily.InterNetwork)
                {
                    localIP = ip.ToString();
                }
            }
            return localIP;
        }
    }
}

Answer 7

Ping to the global broadcast ip address (192.168.1.255)

Normally we will get the reply from all the host connected to the LAN.. Or if you have any particular network for the lan, ping to that networks broadcast id (i.e the last ip address in that range ).

Then you can know all the ip address connected to the host in lan.

Answer 8

Instead of arranging a wild ping-party, you could possibly (I really don't know exactly!) use NetBIOS (request the netbios nametable somehow?) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757216%28WS.10%29.aspx. Or why not ask your DHCP server?