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A Guide to Look@LAN Network Scanner
By TheEmperor | February 8, 2008
Inheriting a network from a previous company or department, or even just a previous tech in your department, can be a nightmare of confusion. Documentation is never as good as it should be and the previous tech is rarely prepared to help you ease into things and show you all of the tips and tricks for dealing with the quirks of the network. One of those most annoying things can actually be finding all of the devices on the network and figuring out what the heck they are. If you are faced with that herculean task fear not my friend Look@LAN makes even the largest network a snap to manage, and it’s free.
As with almost every piece of software I come into contact with the installation consists of double clicking the executable and clicking next until you run out of screens. From there everything about Look@LAN is easy to use. The wizard gives you the option of creating a new profile, opening an existing profile, opening the last profile you had open, or analyzing an individual host.
When you create a new profile you give it a name, and choose the speed. Then you can either pick one of your interfaces and automatically scan that subnet, or manually specify a range of addresses to scan. This lets you scan multiple subnets in the same profile. For example if your office has one subnet for accounting and one for marketing, but they both share the first two octets (192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x) you can use Look@LAN to scan both networks in one pass and monitor all of the machines at once.
Once you have chosen the IP range you would like to scan just click next and within seconds Look@LAN will have a complete list for you. I’ve scanned as many as 180 active IPs and it took less than one minute to complete. This thing is FAST. It’s so fast they should put racing stripes and a spoiler on it. Just for kicks I scanned my Windstream/Alltel subnet. It took 18 seconds and found 63 active IPs. My example network is going to be my personal home network.
You can see the status bars in the top left that show how far along the discovery is, obviouslythe discovery here is complete. On the right you can see the number of Online and Offline IPs, all 4 of my IPs are online. You can also see the Show Graphs button which will display a pie chart showing the operating system makeup, the netbios and SNMP status, and the online/offline ratio. You can also use the dropdown to change the statistics to view different IP ranges if you specified more than one scan range.
If you want to specify additional scan ranges click on the Scan Ranges button at the top. From here you can add another range or remove an existing one. You can configure as many ranges as you need to and monitor all of your clients from this one screen.
The Report button let’s you generate reports about the uptime of the objects you are monitoring as well as other monitored statistics. It is, admittedly, not a feature I use very often. If you click the Create New Report button you can configure the report to scan the network at preset intervals over a specific period of time. The default is every 60 minutes for 24 hours. I like every 10 minutes for 9 hours during the work day. You can then have it automatically generate and export the report to a directory.
Below that is the actual list of IP addresses with their status, the distance in hops, the detected OS, the hostname, the NetBIOS name, the NetBIOS user if it was detected, and the SNMP and Trap status. Double clicking on one of the entries brings up a page with more details, including all of the SNMP info if SNMP is enabled. Even if SNMP is not enabled you get a port scan, traceroute, and pings as well as the host information.
To get the most out of this tool you really should have SNMP enabled on the network. With that you can use this to monitor free disk space, RAM, installed programs, and a myriad of other items. Without it you’ve just a very fast network scanner and monitor. Which is still useful, but not as awesome as it can be.
Right clicking the list of IPs allows you to sort it by any of the available criteria, remove the IP from the list, set trapping for the IP, and copy the IP to the clipboard. Combined with Remote Task Manager you can manage almost every aspect of a PC without the user even knowing about it.
Look@LAN is another must have for anyone who works with networks. The speed and utility of this program is above and beyond any other free program I’ve used and even outperforms most commercial products. The speed of network discovery is lightyears ahead of products like NetworkView which can take hours to scan a network. Definitely add this one to your toolbox.
If you found this guide to be useful pleaseRemote Task Manager, Look@LAN, and Skype. I will address each of those tools briefly in this article, and more in depth in individual reviews. I keep the entire setup on both CD and my Flash drive for easy installation. I can also mail copies of the CD to potential clients or make the files available for download through my website.
Ultra VNC is the most obviously useful component of my remote access suite. Once it is installed on the client PC you can access the PC just as if you were sitting in front of it. When Ultra VNC is installed as a service you don’t even need a user to log on for you. From here you can troubleshoot any issues the client is having with the PC.
Remote Task Manager is the most powerful tool in the package in my opinion. It allows you to access the task manager, the services list, and the event viewer, as well as execute programs remotely. RTM can kill processes that the normal task manager can’t as well, which has proven invaluable to me in the past. It’s also less intrusive than UltraVNC for times when you may need to make an adjustment to a PC without disturbing the user. You will need an administrative password to install the RTM service on the client PC, but it installs silently and runs without bothering the users.
Look@LAN is a very fast and very powerful network discovery tool. It will give you all of the active IPs on the network as well as MAC addresses, open ports, ping times, and traceroutes. If SNMP is enabled it will also access the SNMP Data and display all kind of system info.
Skype is a well known and popular tool for video conferencing. I use it to meet with distant clients who like face to face contact. Those meetings are what really sell you as a consultant, so this piece of software can do more to make you money than any of the others.
Obviously maintaining a remote presence at a client requires a working internet connection at both ends and it helps to have a tech savvy user at the remote site in case you need to talk a user through something, but these tools will let you do an amazing amount of work from thousands of miles away. Everything from desktop troubleshooting to server configuration is at your fingertips.
Pro Tip: Don’t worry about trying to forward ports for every machine on the network. Just get make sure RDP is forwarded to the server and install your tools there. If your client doesn’t have a server then designate one as the “Helpdesk” PC that must remain on all the time and forward your Ultra VNC port to that PC and install your tools on it.
As always please
Topics: LAN, Look@ Lan, consultant, network, network discovery, network monitor, network scanner, port scanner, toolbox |
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