Your home network has more connected devices than you are aware of. It’s important to know how to see all those devices at the network level. Your router may show all of them but I have found that’s not necessarily correct for all devices depending how your network is setup.
There are many reasons why you would want to occasionally audit your network:
- Confirm all devices are indeed known to you
- See if any rogue devices, like a neighbor’s phone you once allowed on, is connecting
- Detect any unauthorized/unknown devices
- Find out the IP addresses of devices like a second router, phone or gaming system
- Create an inventory
This method detailed below will get you a network view and is very simple to do with a widely used, free tool called Zenmap. Zenmap is the graphical front end for Windows of the network scanning tool called Nmap.
Zenmap will allow you to do the same type of scans without having to know the complicated commands or run it from a command/terminal window.
Here’s how to install, run a simplae network scan and read it from Zenmap.
Before you begin you will need to know your IP address range of your home network off your router. You can find out by opening the Command prompt in windows. Either Windows Key + S, type Command. Type Command in the search box in the task bar (if it’s visible). Search for the app in the Start Menu > Windows Accessories > Windows System > Command Prompt.
- Download Zenmap and install it.
- Additional docs and help are here https://nmap.org/book/zenmap.html and here https://nmap.org/zenmap/man.html
- After install run Zenmap
- You will see a window like the one below. The 3 boxes to note are highlighted.
- Target box will be the IP addresses of your home network, most likely 192.168.x.x, see above for steps to get that if you don’t know.
- Next enter the IP address range of your home network in the Target box like this
- 192.168.1-254
- This will tell Zenmap to scan all IP addresses from 192.168.1.1 through 192.168.1.254.
- In the Profile drop down box select Ping Scan.
- Hit Scan
- A few minutes might pass but eventually you will get results.
- The results will display all devices on your network that responded to a ping. You can do more intense scans to find devices that dont respond to pings and get more information on the device but you can start with a Ping scan.
- The results will display all devices on your network that responded to a ping. You can do more intense scans to find devices that dont respond to pings and get more information on the device but you can start with a Ping scan.
- Target box will be the IP addresses of your home network, most likely 192.168.x.x, see above for steps to get that if you don’t know.
That’s it. Now you have a list of active devices with their names, if it responded with it and the IP address.
This will be a good go to scanner trick to help you quickly identify all devices on your network.
Be aware, be safe.
