Windows Network Discovery Using Built-in Tools

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals.

— E. James Rohn.

Hi guys, last week I’ve worked on a vanilla Windows 10 client computer without internet but is connected to a LAN with many computer.

I’ve asked myself on how to get all alive computers in the network using only built in tools from Windows.

Here are the things I’ve did in order to accomplish this feat.

First thing I did was ping all broadcast IP using ping <broadcast ip> -t -i 4. This will ping the broadcast IP, this action will spread and send all message to all active computers in the network. After that we would wait for around 5-10 seconds, and execute the follow up command which is arp -a. The arp command will check the address resolution protocol and list it down.

The -i 4 on the ping command instructs to ping only on IPv4 (Internet Protocol Version 4) network. That’s all there is to it. Kindly check the manual page of the commands for different flag combinations.

❌ Originally posted on August 18, 2019