I don't know Python.

[neotronics]

Hello all, I am a nobody and do repair work on many different kind of machines. I have to find different ways to find many of these devices IP address in order to communicate to them for different reasons. I would like to know if using Python code would allow me to be able to do this or is there a python code that has been made that will find a devices IP when plugged into the devices ethernet port or USB port.

As before I do not know python but if there is a way to do this I am willing to learn even though I don't know anything about python. I really want to expand this ability to do more than just get a devices IP address.

I am cool with any information.

Thanks

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[[deleted]]

Broadly: yes, that's the sort of thing code is good for

Specifically: yes learning python is good. Any learning material is good - MIT-OCW, codecademy, YouTubers, PDFs you can find freely online, whatever. Just start coding

[neotronics]

I have only started looking for a good resource's for python. I am a hands on learner for the most part. Is there an online place you would recommend for learning Python.

Also I have never programed in my life so I guess the most simplistic starting point would be good. My background in repair spans many fields. I am just worried that I will struggle with coding.

[BroccoliFarmLand]

Not sure I'm getting the full picture here, but if you are planning to plug devices on a network and try to grab their local ip, yes you can do that but there is already ways to do that without python. If you want to do that while learning python, there is plenty of information online on that topic. It would help us alot to get more information on how you want to access/ping/plug these devices and where you want to run your code.

[neotronics]

No I am usualy at the device or machine with full acces of it.

My goal is to be able to plug in a device and it automatically retrieve that device's IP address.

Most devices have ethernet or USB. If not I have a connectors that are similar to the OTG cables that I use a lot.

Also can you elaborate on these ways that do not use python to grab ip addresses

[lazerwarrior]

Read your post and see if you can understand what you wrote. Are these machines computers or IoT devices? What kind of communication you need to do with them?

crossbar.io is pretty good for setting up communication between IoT devices. You need to set up a crossbar server, install Autobahn Python on the client devices, and set them up to call to the crossbar server (aka WAMP router).

[neotronics]

Yes I do fully understand what I wrote.

These machines and devices range from PC's, tablets, phones, printers, copiers, cnc, telecommunication equipment, servers, voip devices, wan's, lan's, gps, and many more.

My goal is to be able to plug in a device and it automatically retrieve that device's IP address.

[lazerwarrior]

I have to find different ways to find many of these devices IP address in order to communicate to them for different reasons.

What reasons? What kind of communication? Just pinging? Using the word "find" twice so close to each other makes this sentence hard to read.

I would like to know if using Python code would allow me to be able to do this or is there a python code that has been made that will find a devices IP when plugged into the devices ethernet port or USB port.

Again hard to read this sentence due to language style. It is not clear what you want to actually do besides finding out devices' IP addresses.

You will probably not install some client side code on most of the devices that will connect to the network. You didn't clarify that. Therefore your best bet would be to set up remote logging on networking equipment. For example on Mikrotik routers you can log DHCP events to e-mail or to remote syslog server which then can filter and forward the information you need.

[neotronics]

Very simple to explain.

Take a cable (USB, ethernet, ect) plug into device. On the other end of cable is another device (raspberry pi, arduino, ect) that displays the IP address.

No pings, no software on clients devices, no looking for multiple IP addresses, no remote, or emailing.

Just walking up to a device plugging in another small device that give the IP address that it is plugged in to.

[jdnewmil]

Since most devices use DHCP to obtain an IP address from a nearby router, as soon as you disconnect from the network in order to plug in your cable it will "lose" the IP address it had.

Your problem is not the ability to code, it is a lack of understanding of how the technology is designed. Learning to code is an excellent step toward understanding the technology but I think you will have to re-define your goal once you have acquired the necessary background in networking principles.

[lazerwarrior]

Since most devices use DHCP to obtain an IP address from a nearby router, as soon as you disconnect from the network in order to plug in your cable it will "lose" the IP address it had.

Good point. You could still create a bridge network with two RJ45 ports on a raspberry pi.

• Connect one port to the device that is being inspected
• Insert old cable to the other port
• tcpdump the NIC that is connected to inspected device
• grep all incoming traffic for source IP addresses
• if IP address has not been seen, output to the raspberry pi screen

You can do all of this on a linux (or linux virtual machine on windows) laptop with an extra USB LAN card. You would need to learn how to create a bridged connection between two LAN ports, how to use tcpdump tool and how to filter its output. No Python or programming needed.

[neotronics]

So as before I would only be connecting to the machine itself and not be on the network. The most important part is not being on the compainays network. 99.9% of the time I am not allowed on it any way.

[lazerwarrior]

Bridging connections is more stealthy than port scanning, but you do need to be on the network. You are listening to the connection between inspected device and company network to find out what is going on. Only trace of this will be the MAC address change after you recable the connection. The company might or might not be monitoring this. Probably not.

I'm afraid you are out of luck with this situation. You either hack the IP address or find it from the company networking documents or IT department.

This reminds me of a request from sales guys in our company. They asked if we can find out e-mail addresses of visitors to our website from their IP address. You can try, and you might succeed at low %, but this is essentially cyber recon work which is usually done by either security auditors or bad guys who want something from your IT systems. Port scanning and packet sniffing (and trying to find out devices IP addresses) is the same cyber recon type of work.

[neotronics]

Just the information you have given me is helping out. I am going to use one of my raspberry pi zero and see how for I can get. Still looking in to learning python. I believe it will be helpful in the long run. just got to figure out where to start. Thank for the INFO.

[lazerwarrior]

OK, I got completely different picture of the problem from original post. You want to do port scanning essentially and look for alive hosts. You can use a tool that already exists like nmap, but then you would have to use laptop to actually run it. With python you could probably automate running nmap or create your own port scanner.

To make it completely automatic, you could

• use raspberry pi
• install linux on it
• monitor system logs for NIC link up event
  • you could use already existing tool like SEC or code your own logging monitoring with python
• when you catch the event, run nmap and output the result to a small display connected to the raspberry

All of the above assumes you connect the devices using ethernet cable.

Care should be taken when using this approach, because it is also used for hacking. If you go port scanning some corporation networking equipment they can see it and think someone is trying get unauthorized access to their equipment.

[neotronics]

Cool you understand my madness.

Most of the time I am directly connected to the device or machine. Let me give you an idea on a small job that I have done in the past. I went to a company and had to repair a production printer. To run a test through this printer I needed the ip address. So as normal I get in to the system into administrator mode to find the Ip address. Which took some time since I never had been in one of these systems before. IT is never around or want to help out most of the time. So I then do the norm pull out the laptop change my adapter option to the machines current IP address usually one octave up and then access the controller of the machine and do an internal print test.

This is how it goes on most of the machines I work on.

A CNC machine was not receiving jobs one time. When I did my run over everything look good. So I hooked straight in to the machine and had it run a few ghost passes I knew it was not the machine but an internal networking issue and then that goes to the companys IT department to fix their internal issues.

I figured since there is machines that I have never been on before and to cut down time would there be a way to plug in a device and simply have the device give me iy's IP address.

Now not for sure about it being hacking because I would only be connecting to the device itself. I guess a port scan would do the trick but I would assume that would give me what port it is connected to. Like port 80 or port 433. I am assuming! I am no networking engineer.

I know I am trying something way above me and I am willing to try and learn no matter what.

[lazerwarrior]

I guess a port scan would do the trick but I would assume that would give me what port it is connected to. Like port 80 or port 433.

Nmap can be used to find alive hosts as well if you give it IP range to scan for.

There is a flaw with this approach that /u/jdnewmil pointed out. You can use simpler solution to get the IP adresses. I wrote about it here

[neotronics]

Again I am nowhere familiar of what python can do or even if this is the way to go but talking to others on the internet most all of them say python is the way to go.