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How can I do an inverse ARP lookup in Windows and/or Linux? Say that I have the MAC address of wireless access point which is up and running in the network, but I forgot it's IP address?

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I know I'd get flamed with this if I put it as an answer: experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_20279274.html –  Jeffrey Aug 25 '09 at 20:08
@Jeffrey - Just mark it as a community wiki - And if the referrer is not google the link is useless anyway. –  Diago Aug 25 '09 at 20:10
You're right - that site really is the devil. –  Jeffrey Aug 25 '09 at 20:12
I believe the term is 'reverse arp', rather than inverse, you might have more luck searching with this. –  Dentrasi Aug 25 '09 at 20:15
I thought so too, but reverse arp is something else. It's asking the network what your own IP is (replaced by DHCP) –  Bart van Heukelom Aug 26 '09 at 12:56

4 Answers 4

up vote 15 down vote accepted

The easiest way to do this is to ping the broadcast address (ping -b [broadcast address) on your subnet (often .255), and then dump your arp table (arp -a on Linux), and you should find the MAC of the machine, along with its IP.

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Why the -b? On osx -b specifies an interface to bind to –  mist Jul 28 at 9:25

arping2 has an example arping-scan-net.sh which finds the IP address of a given mac address in a given network subnet. It works by scanning each ip address, so It works when broadcast pings are discarded (a very common situation)

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From a bad, bad place, written by scraig84:

Typically you would need to find it on one of your machine's arp tables. If there is a router in your network, this is usually the most central place to gather that type of info. On a cisco router, the command is "show arp" - it will give you a listing of the MAC addresses and their corresponding IP address. On a windows box, from a DOS prompt you can type "arp -a" to see similar output.

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Also you can use nmap this is utility for network discovery, in Ubuntu you can simply install it from command line: apt-get install nmap For ping scan network use: nmap -sP xx.xx.xx.xx/yy as a result you find all hosts in network. You can use other scan technics (if host not respond to ICMP ping) for scanning the network.

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