Detecting computers on network

[Sybren Stuvel]

Peter Tillotson enlightened us with:
> You could use a sniffer in promiscuous mode. pypcap -- or something
> like. This will record every packet seen by your network card.
> Whether is will work depends on whether you are on a true braodcast
> network.

That's not going to work on a switched network, which most modern
networks are.

> Windows boxes positively shout about there presence :-)

Definitely true.

> baically this is pasive nmap, nmap will try to open a tcp or udp
> connection on every  machine. your going to generat a lot of
> traffic.

Not if you tell it to use ICMP pings only.

Sybren
-- 
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? 
                                             Frank Zappa