I have a bunch of machines on an IP range which I want to ping simultaneously as a quick and dirty way of telling which ones are switched on. What (free) software can I use to do this?

[Edit] I should add that I'm using Windows (Vista)

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I tried angry ip scanner and free ip scanner and angry seems faster after increasing it's maximum thread count to the range of IPs I was after. – Jon Cage Sep 24 '09 at 7:59
there's a slight chance this might trip off some kind of security. It might be a better bet to have the machines set to ping a central server at certain intervals, or check at the router. – Journeyman Geek May 20 '11 at 0:43
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8 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

The quickest way is to use Angry IP Scanner

alt text

I use it for the same way you want to!

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pretty nice, but not free! – 0xFF Sep 23 '09 at 15:57
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It is free? I have been using it for years. – William Hilsum Sep 23 '09 at 16:01
Er.. yes it is? – Jon Cage Sep 23 '09 at 16:03
That's so good! :D +1 – BloodPhilia Jun 23 '10 at 19:54
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nmap is available for Windows:

# nmap -sP 10.0.10.1-100
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nmap is absolutely a great piece of software – Ram Sep 24 '09 at 4:06
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I've used this command

for %%i in 200 to 254 do ping 10.1.1.%%i

in a batch file for a similar reason

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are you sure it does a simultaneous ping? or is it one machine after another! – Vineet Menon Nov 29 '11 at 10:52
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Free IP Scanner 1.6

Here is the range of IP as you can notice :

alt text

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try fping

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you could just write a bash script that loops through an ip range and pings them...

for i in {100..255}
do
   ping 10.1.1.i
done
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I think that "500" wants to be 255 or less? – David Mackintosh Sep 24 '09 at 2:41
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And I think ping 10.1.1.i probably wants to be ping 10.1.1.$i. – Adam Luchjenbroers Jan 4 '10 at 6:14
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Instead of manually pinging all IP addresses on your LAN you can do the following:

Open a Command Prompt and type:

FOR /L %i IN (1,1,254) DO ping -n 1 192.168.0.%i | FIND /i "Reply">>C:\ipaddresses.txt

-n 1 means that only 1 ping packet will be sent to each computer.

Change 192.168.0 to match you own network ID.

This will ping all IP addresses on the 192.168.0.0 network segment and create a text file called ipaddresses.txt in C:\, where it will list only the IP addresses that gave a reply.

You can also add -a to the ping command to resolve all the responding IP addresses to hostnames, but doing so will cause the script to take a considerable time to finish:

FOR /L %i IN (1,1,254) DO ping -a -n 1 192.168.0.%i | FIND /i "Reply">>C:\ipaddresses.txt
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This still pings them one at a time though doesn't it? Angry IP scanner pings all IP's in the subnet at once by launching multiple threads so it takes very little time to complete a whole scan. – Jon Cage Apr 12 '10 at 8:38
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Save the below script on the server with an extension of .bat or .cmd and call the file from the command prompt. It should prompt you to enter the IP range.

Please enter only 3 octets of the IP address.


@echo off

SET count=0
SET /p subnet=Please enter IP range (Ex 192.168.0)

:start
SET /a count=%count%+1

cls
ECHO. & ECHO Trying %subnet%.%count% & ECHO.

ping -n 1 -w 1000 %subnet%.%count% >nul  
IF %errorlevel%==0 echo %subnet%.%count% UP >> c:\pingnet.log  
IF %errorlevel%==1 echo %subnet%.%count% DOWN >> c:\pingnet.log

IF %count%==254 goto :eof

GOTO start

Once the command has run, it will create a text file name pingnet.log in the root of C drive. That file should give you a list of used and down (free) IP addresses.

For example:

10.2.214.1 UP   
10.2.214.2 UP   
10.2.214.3 UP   
10.2.214.4 DOWN 

Pretty simple to run and it should save you loads of time.

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This is actually pretty slow compared to angry IP scanner as it does them one at a time. Unless most of the IP range is used, you'd have to wait minutes for this approach to give you an answer. – Jon Cage Dec 14 '11 at 7:25
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