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Scan your local network to find the board IP and MAC address

Introduction​

During the development of your embedded project, you might need a remote connection to the board. This article will show how you can scan your local network in order to find the IP address of your board.

Prerequisites​

Linux​

First, use the ip command to list the network interfaces available and active on your computer:

$ ip link show up
caution

Make sure that both your board and your PC are connected to the same LAN.

A relatively big list might be displayed, depending on how many physical and virtual active interfaces you have. Two interfaces will be printed for sure:

  • lo, which is a loopback interface.
  • Some wired or wireless interface. It usually starts with eth, enp or wlo. See from the example below, that the wired interface is enp3s0f1 and the Wi-Fi is wlo1:

List of network interfaces on a PC

After you have identified one interface connected to the same network as your board, use arp-scan to find the board IP address:

# sudo arp-scan --localnet --interface=<your interface>

See an example below, where the board IP and MAC addresses, found by scanning the LAN from the interface enp3s0f1 on your PC, are 192.168.10.43 and 00:14:2d:63:19:3f respectively:

List of devices on a network

In the example above, we could have scanned the LAN from the Wi-Fi wlo1 only if it was it was connected to the same LAN (usually the same router) then the board.

Windows​

Open the PowerShell, run the ipconfig command and write down your ipv4 address:

caution

Make sure that both your board and your PC are connected to the same LAN.

Using ipconfig to find the ipv4 adress

After discovering your ipv4 address, just scan it using the previously installed nmap program:

# nmap -sn <your-ip>
info

You can replace the last two numbers of your local ipv4 address with *, which will make Nmap scan all addresses on your local network.

Using Nmap from to scan your local network

Please refer to the official Nmap documentation if you need more information.

Next Steps​

Now that you have your board's IP address you can Establish an SSH Connection.



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