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I noticed that my XP pops up a baloon about that it found my UPNP-enabled router whenever I reconnect network.

In my windows command line, I can enter Net View supposedly to see computers in the workgroup (although currently I cannot see the computer next door when I should but this is unrelated;).)

Windows Media Player in Vista introduced some feature that can detect shared media over the network.

If I enter windows' network, it makes something like a samba discovery.

I guess in Linux there are other similar protocols in use that work over LAN. And in Mac, too.

  • What are these protocols? I mean, more accurately than, say, 'based on UDP'.
  • What other protocols are common? (eg. built-in in some used version of Windows, MacOSX, Top10 Linux distro., or topping in some category in alternativeto and worth to mention.)
  • Is there a tool for them to list available computers/peers on LAN - preferably over the command line?

(Is there a tool that can list nodes by multiple protocols?)

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    SSDP, AVAHI/Bonjour, NetBEUI/netbios-ns, ect. if you really want to find hosts, use nmap/zenmap. nmap uses pure IP and TCP/UDP probes so it doesn't matter what kind of advertising/discovery protocol is in play, nmap will find everything. Jun 3, 2013 at 19:06

2 Answers 2

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UPnP uses UDP/1900(Standard) and TCP/2869(Microsoft).

There are two options that I know of to scan for this.

This tool http://upnp-check.rapid7.com/.

Or nmap with the upnp-info script.

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nmap will list other computers on the same subnet. You could also do a simple ping scan using a loop in Linux like:

for I in {1..254}
do
ping -c1 192.168.1.${I} && echo host is UP || echo Host is down
done

That assumes your subnet is 192.168.1.0/24

Macs use Multicast DNS ( MDNS) also known as Bonjour for service discovery. Linux used avahi and DNS-SD for service discovery.

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