Live hosts detection is a very important tool for every penetration tester and ethical hacking. In this tutorial we are going to use Nmap in Kali Linux to scan the network for live hosts. You can use the command ifconfig to determine which IP range you will be scanning for live hosts. We will be using a ping scan on a range of possible live hosts in our network. Nmap will be pinging each host in this range to determine whether the host is live or not. I this tutorial we will be using nmap for scanning and detecting hosts on the network. Needless to say is that there are many tools available for host detection, also for mobile devices. A very popular mobile app for this purpose is Fing Network Scanner. You can download this app in the Apple app store and in the Google Playstore for Android.
Nmap scanning for live hosts
Start a ping scan for live hosts using the following command:
nmap -sP 192.168.0.0-100
Nmap will return a list of all detected hosts:
Add -v to your command to increase the verbosity of the ping scan:
nmap -sP 192.168.0.0-100 -v
This will return all scanned hosts with their status.
Nmap Live Host Scanning video tutorial
