What is the IP address of all the equipment connected to your network?

This is question that a surprising number of network administrator’s donot know the answer to.

In all fairness if you are running a medium to large network keeping track can be a time consuming job and if DHCP is enabled and automatically allocating IP Addresses why bother. Well DHCP should be switch off and IP Address should be allocated manually. I am positive that lots of highly qualified and better informed people than myself would argue with this statement. But I will support my reasoning behind this statement.

Story time.

Long Long ago in the magical land of Ethernet, actually, a few years ago on my network. I was patting myself on the back for locking down the network. A few things I had done where the following.

1. I had gone through every share on the server updating where necessary removing old redundant shares ect.

2. I had audited every client machine on my network updating software configurations, licence details ect.

3. I locked down all the client machines stopping access to network neighbourhood stopping mapping of drives and half a dozen of tweaks which effectively blocked use of the control panels.

Effectively no one could change the configuration of there desktop without my direct intervention. All was well and I was a happy chappie. Then someone popped my little bubble. One of my clients went and purchased himself a laptop, and with out my knowledge bought it into work. Then during his lunch break plugged it into the network. The server then automatically issued it an IP Address, putting in his username and password he could surf the network using network neighbourhood. Because of security setting on the network he only had the same overall access he had on his company computer, but it does not take a great deal of imagination to see what could happen. I found out because my MD walked in on him and I was left in a very embarrassing position.

Hiding the IP Addresses used on your network is nothing but a paper shield and does not constitute a significant security measure but it would have stop the casual logon of this client. And it should be noted that anything which will slow down unauthorised access no matter how small is a good thing.

That said how do you find out the IP Address on your network well the simplest way is to use an IP Scanner. The scanner I use is Angry IP Scanner which can be downloaded free from http://ipscan.sourceforge.net/ . I have used others but they have all sorts of features that I never use. This scanner is simple and does exactly what I need it to do which is list the IP Address on my network.

Try it and see what you think.

Thankyou for Reading CYA Later. :-)

Useful Forum.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is my web programming language of choice.

The link below is a very useful forum, I have used others but this is the flavour of the month.

Link:::: http://forums.aspfree.com/

Thankyou for Reading CYA Later :-)