Nmap 6: Network Exploration and Security Auditing Cookbook

Finding live hosts in your network

Finding live hosts in a network is often used by penetration testers to enumerate active targets, and by system administrators to count or monitor the number of active hosts.

This recipe describes how to perform a ping scan, to find live hosts in a network by using Nmap.

How to do it...

Open your terminal and enter the following command:

$ nmap -sP 192.168.1.1/24

The result shows hosts that are online and responded to the ping sweep.

Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.102 
Host is up. 
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.254 
Host is up (0.0027s latency). 
MAC Address: 5C:4C:A9:F2:DC:7C (Huawei Device Co.) 
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (2 hosts up) scanned in 10.18 seconds 

In this case, we found two live hosts in the network. ...