AngryIpScanner – not so angry, free and open source IP Scanner

During my day to day Admin duties I get a lot of people pulling me over to the side to ask me “home networking” or “personal” questions. A normal one I get quite frequently is “how can I find out the IP address of a device on my network?” or “What is my TiVo’s IP?”

These end users always make it seem like they are trying to sell me Drugs a kidney on the black market…

“Pssst… Karl. Umm I have a… Ummm”

“What’s going on random end user dude?”

“Well I have a question… But it’s… “personal” Is that OK??”

I usually chuckle and say no.

I pause and go back over to the lost individual and ask them what their deal is.

My recommendation to them is download AngryIPScanner and figure it out for themselves. After the usual deer-caught-in-the-headlights-stare they usually say :

“Huh?”

I tell them to go to download.com and download the newest version of Angry IpScanner. It is a free open source….wait for it….

IP Scanner!

It will allow you to scan a internal or external network for live hosts and even check open ports and some other geeky goodness that will come in handy when you least expect it. The best part of all, this tiny app can be run off of a memory stick as it does not need to be installed.

Here is a shot of the options and what information you can “fetch” and have displayed on the above grid.

For the novices, all they need to do is open the program up and their IP address is already pre-populated on the start of the IP range line. Just change the last number of the IP address to be .1 and in the end make the last number .255. So if the IP address that shows up is 192.168.0.45 I would make the start IP 192.168.0.1 and the end address 192.168.0.255. This will scan my whole subnet for machines or devices.

It is very straight forward and can come in VERY handy. I recommend this guy being added to your USB tool kit immediately! I have been using it for almost 5 years and they recently released the newest version in BETA which is SUPER fast. Give it a go and let us know what you think. Do you use something else? Think you got a better solution?

Well smart guy that’s what the comments are for!

By: Karl L. Gechlik, A superhero of the IT industry. He runs a global WAN, cracks the whip at his consulting company and gets the whip cracked at him by his beautiful wife and daughter! To follow more of his geeky antics check out his site www.askTheAdmin.com today!

Tagged: IP • portable app • scanner • usb drives

Karl L. Gechlik

Karl L. Gechlik here from AskTheAdmin.com doing a weekly guest blogging spot for our new found friends at MakeUseOf.com. I run my own consulting company, manage AskTheAdmin.com and work a full 9 to 5 job on Wall street as a System Administrator.

http://aravindjose.com/blog Aravind

Excuse me,
is the use of this IP Scanner considered as Port Scanning (as it checks for open ports)???

ISPs consider port scanning as a sure sign of hacker activity and in most cases take necessary actions to prevent it…

http://www.askTheAdmin.com AskTheAdmin | Karl Gechlik

We obviously only advocate the use of this for legit scanning – like on your own networks or to troubleshoot/diagnose network issues and like the examples I gave in the article to track down devices.

You can use tools for good and evil and that is why Symantec does delete AngryIPScanner but it is not by far malware or anything like that. I have been using it for years and it has been an invaluable resource!
Tom

I was kicked off an ISP for using this tool too much a few years ago, and I wasn’t using the check open port option. Just be very weary when using it outside your LAN.

joseph

Too bad anti-virus companies (Symantec) consider this valuable tool malware and delete it. There’s an online petition for them to change this but so far nothing’s changed.
http://www.realphoenixliving.com Steve Belt

Nice little tool, Karl. I’m going to give a special spot in my office…I’m always forgetting the IP address of my wireless routers.
Mike

this is a cool little auditing tool. I’m installing it…
ffm

Uh, this is also usable by mac and linux users, see http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=25534

http://www.askTheAdmin.com AskTheAdmin | Karl Gechlik

That’s awesome FFM! Let’s see if we can add that to the article.

http://www.tradeo.biz yMladenov

hey that’s an awesome tool
Great job!

Just a real pitty i cannot use it properly – i’m trying to find out the mac of a friend and tell it to him, but i think my WinXP ports thing is the problem. He’s in a remote LAN.
http://www.IMO.com imoDOTcom

I tried to download the files for i86 (Win XP). They downloaded OK, BUT they never executed ?!

(That is, clicking or double-clicking them did NOT install the program.)

What could I have done wrong? Any suggestions?

— imoDOTcom —