Make network management more efficient! Quickly scan the LAN and obtain IP and MAC addresses in real time

Have you ever received a network failure alert late at night? When a device in the network has a problem, many tasks will come to a standstill, affecting the normal operation of employees. Faced with the complex network architecture within the company, how to quickly locate the problem device and find its IP address and MAC address has become a major challenge for many operation and maintenance personnel.

Sometimes, the problem may just be caused by a small device failure, or a newly added device accidentally interferes with the stable operation of the entire LAN. If the information of these devices cannot be quickly confirmed, the troubleshooting process may be extended for hours or even a whole day. Imagine if we can efficiently and accurately scan the entire LAN and obtain the IP and MAC address information of all online devices in real time. This will not only greatly improve the speed of fault location, but also significantly improve the quality of overall network management. Doesn't such a solution sound very attractive?

Challenges in production environments

Let's imagine that in a typical enterprise network environment, the technical department is responsible for a large number of devices, from printers, workstations to servers and routers, each of which may affect the production and operation of the enterprise. Every time a network failure occurs, IT operation and maintenance personnel will face the following challenges:

• Difficulty in locating devices: There are many types of devices in the LAN, the IP address allocation is chaotic, and the binding relationship between MAC addresses and devices is unclear, making it difficult to troubleshoot problems.
• Low scanning efficiency: Traditional manual inspection methods are not only time-consuming, but also prone to missing certain surviving devices.
• Poor real-time performance: In the face of emergency failures, manual scanning may waste valuable time and delay the troubleshooting process.

This problem seems to bother all IT operation and maintenance personnel: How to comprehensively scan the entire LAN in the shortest time and obtain the IP address and MAC address of the device in real time?

Quickly scan the LAN and accurately obtain device information

In fact, through automated script scanning, we can quickly and accurately obtain the IP and MAC addresses of all devices, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of network troubleshooting. Whether it is a newly connected device or an old device in the network, it can be caught in one fell swoop.

By combining the Python script with the ping command and the arp command, we can achieve the following goals:

• Quickly detect live devices: quickly identify which devices are online by performing batch scanning on IP segments.
• Accurately obtain the MAC address: The arp command can be used to easily obtain the MAC address of the device, which helps to further identify the device type or perform network isolation.
• Real-time output results: The information of all surviving devices, including IP and MAC addresses, is output in real time to help operation and maintenance personnel to instantly understand the network status and respond quickly.

The following is a concise and easy-to-use Python script designed to help quickly scan devices in the local area network. It can effectively collect key information of online devices, including IP addresses, MAC addresses, and their operating system types, and display them in a clear and neat table format.

 import os import subprocess import platform import re import concurrent.futures # 检查IP是否存活def ping_ip(ip): param = "-n"if platform.system().lower() == "windows"else"-c" command = ["ping", param, "1", ip] response = subprocess.run(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) return response.returncode == 0 # 获取MAC地址def get_mac(ip): command = ["arp", "-a", ip] result = subprocess.run(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, text=True) match = re.search(r"([a-fA-F0-9]{2}[:-]){5}[a-fA-F0-9]{2}", result.stdout) return match.group(0) if match elseNone # 获取设备平台def get_platform(ip): try: result = subprocess.run(["nmap", "-O", ip], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, text=True) if"OS details"in result.stdout: os_match = re.search(r"OS details: (.*)", result.stdout) if os_match: return os_match.group(1) except Exception: return"Unknown" return platform.system() # 扫描单个IP的功能def scan_single_ip(ip): if ping_ip(ip): mac = get_mac(ip) platform_info = get_platform(ip) return {"ip": ip, "mac": mac, "platform": platform_info} returnNone # 扫描IP段def scan_network(ip_range): live_ips = [] with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=10) as executor: # 使用多线程results = executor.map(scan_single_ip, ip_range) for result in results: if result: live_ips.append(result) return live_ips # 示例IP段生成器def generate_ip_range(network): base_ip = network.split(".") ip_range = [] for i in range(1, 255): ip_range.append(".".join(base_ip[:3] + [str(i)])) return ip_range # 格式化输出def print_ip_mac(live_ips): print("IP\t\t\tMAC Address\t\t\tPlatform") print("-" * 60) for info in live_ips: print(f"{info['ip']}\t\t{info['mac']}\t\t{info['platform']}") if __name__ == "__main__": network = "192.168.171"# 假设扫描192.168.171.1到192.168.171.254 ip_range = generate_ip_range(network) live_ips = scan_network(ip_range) print_ip_mac(live_ips)

• ping_ip method: Use the ping command to check whether the given IP address is online. Return True if the IP address is online, False if it is not online.
• get_mac method: Use the arp command to get the MAC address of a given IP address.
• get_platform method: Get the device's operating system information through the nmap command.
• scan_single_ip method: Scan a single IP address to check whether the device is online. If online, obtain the MAC address and platform information.
• scan_network method: Scan the entire IP segment and obtain information about all surviving devices (IP, MAC, platform).
• generate_ip_range method: Generates an IP range based on a given network prefix.
• print_ip_mac method: Formats and prints the scan results.

After successfully running the above script, you will see the following results:

 root@wtrpro:~# python3 scan_network.py IP MAC Address Platform ------------------------------------------------------------ 192.168.31.1 bc:24:11:fa:87:44 Linux 192.168.31.100 bc:24:11:50:ff:92 Linux 4.15 - 5.6

Summarize

Through such automated scanning, you can be freed from tedious manual troubleshooting and accurately identify the IP and MAC addresses of each device. Whether it is to improve network management efficiency or to deal with sudden network failures, the fast scanning tool will be an important assistant for IT operation and maintenance personnel.