Looking for a way to detect my own hosts in a private network

I'm looking for a way to detect my own hosts (e.g. two notebooks or notebook and raspberry pi) in a private network (e.g. at the house of a friend).

In my mind there are some options to do so:

write a deamon to broadcast the information
write a script with some ARP requests with the mac address
et cetera

But I have no idea if something like this exists, or if I have to write it by myself.

One scenario this could be used for is: I bring my raspi and my notebook to a friends house, connect both hosts to his network and now I don't want to add a monitor to the raspi and look up the address and I don't have access to the router so I can't look into the dhcp lease table.

Any ideas or hints?

Thanks in advance.

High Ball

Posted 2013-12-05T20:57:29.317

Reputation: 111

See if this answer can help you

– VL-80 – 2013-12-05T21:02:05.700

For implement something like what I want arping will be a nice tool. Thank you. – High Ball – 2013-12-06T08:23:26.820

Answers

Use a tool like nmap(https://serverfault.com/questions/148113/can-i-use-nmap-be-use-to-discover-ips-and-mac-addresses) or if you want to use a smartphone/tablet download an app like Fing, or you can simply reference it using its hostname(ex. ssh ACCOUNT@RPIHOSTNAME.local).

user270595

Posted 2013-12-05T20:57:29.317

Reputation:

This is exactly what mDNS is intended for. You didn't specify your operating systems, but on Linux, this is implemented by the Avahi daemon, and on Mac, by the Bonjour service. Windows has its own protocol (LLMNR) which isn't compatible with mDNS.

user2313067

Posted 2013-12-05T20:57:29.317

Reputation: 2 160

This works in my own network or in well configured networks, but not at every network. This bad configured router/modem/wifi-aps from all the different isps doesn't work well with mDNS. – High Ball – 2013-12-06T08:22:11.923