Question

How to find LAN machine name?

Asked by: howei

I have one machine on the network (W2K) which is responding to ping but can't find  what is it.

I tried "ping -a IP", "nbtstat -A IP", tried looking into DNS table but can't find its machine/windows name.

This got to be static IP, not DHCP assigned.

What else can I do?

Thanks for help

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Asked On
2004-08-06 at 12:01:33ID21085158
Tags

machine

,

name

,

ip

,

find

,

how

Topics

Miscellaneous Networking

,

Domain Name Service (DNS)

Participating Experts
4
Points
50
Comments
9

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Answers

 

by: Jeff_RodgersPosted on 2004-08-06 at 12:11:14ID: 11738598

Can you browse to the machine by ip address? i.e.\\192.168.168.168\c$
By browsing the local drive you may be able to determine clues as to its nature (i.e. printers, OS, manufacturer) which will help you to narrow down what and where it is.

Also try browsing to it by http:\\ip address (most network enabled printers have built in web components) or if you suspect it is either an XP or Windows 2003 server try remote desktop connection to the IP address.

Few ideas to help you anyways.

Good Luck

 

by: howeiPosted on 2004-08-06 at 12:32:11ID: 11738764

I like your suggestions but answer is No, No and No.

I did tracert to an internet site and noticed that my packets are first going to this machine on the LAN and than to firewal which was not the case in the past.

How do you hide machine name from "ping -a IP" command anyways?

 

by: kabaamPosted on 2004-08-06 at 12:46:18ID: 11738888

>>>I did tracert to an internet site and noticed that my packets are first going to this machine
This may be a router on your network that is acting like a gateway. Routers maintain there own Ip address and may not show up in dns
Any routers added lately that could be between the pc and the firewall?
K

 

by: Jeff_RodgersPosted on 2004-08-06 at 12:49:14ID: 11738909

What kind of firewall are you using ? Are you running NAT through your firewall... curious to know the Ip addresses (internal )you are seeing...No proxy servers etc?

 

by: howeiPosted on 2004-08-06 at 13:07:38ID: 11739026

Good guess kabaam!

I was able to telnet into this unit and discovered that it is switch/router.
We had some change recently but I wasn't aware that they added this one.

Firewall is ISA, which does NAT.

I noticed that even on some windows machines you can't soemetimes get return on machine name when you ping it with -a switch (it should usually return machine name). Any cluess on how this is done?

 

by: kabaamPosted on 2004-08-06 at 13:15:42ID: 11739103

I believe ping -a will use the REVERSE lookup zone from the DNS server.  
Check your reverse lookup zone entries and you should see what will work using ping -a
just a guess though

 

by: MarkDozierPosted on 2004-08-06 at 15:54:42ID: 11740178

there is a neat program called Look@LAN you should try. While it would not have solved this issue it may have eliminated a lot of possibilies.

 

by: howeiPosted on 2004-08-09 at 08:04:04ID: 11753078

Thank you for sharing Mark. It is neat!

 

by: omhogePosted on 2008-09-10 at 10:30:33ID: 22440763

We used nslookup and could find the machine name from the IP address.
hope that helps the next person who stumbles onto this thread.

thanks everyone.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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