How to find unused IP Address on a network?

A fast scanner is arp-scan which uses ARP to "see" other machines on a network. It also returns the MAC address and tries to determine the manufacturer of the network adapter.

Example usage (replace wlan0 by eth0 if needed):

$ sudo arp-scan -I wlan0 192.168.1.0/24
Interface: wlan0, datalink type: EN10MB (Ethernet)
Starting arp-scan 1.6 with 256 hosts (http://www.nta-monitor.com/tools/arp-scan/)
192.168.1.10    00:90:f5:33:e2:f2       CLEVO CO.
192.168.1.254   00:14:7f:72:cd:05       Thomson Telecom Belgium

2 packets received by filter, 0 packets dropped by kernel
Ending arp-scan 1.6: 256 hosts scanned in 1.406 seconds (182.08 hosts/sec).  2 responded

Note that this utility only reports machines which are powered on. ping can be blocked, but arp-scan cannot be blocked since it's necessary for a machine to interact with other machines on a network. To be sure that an IP is unused, you'd better look at your router (for static/dynamic addresses) and DHCP server (for dynamic addresses).

sudo nmap -sP -PR 192.168.0.* (or whatever your network is) will do the trick.

To install it use sudo apt-get install nmap.

Source: serverfault.com.

Just tested this, works like a charm including obscured hosts, you need to add sudo to be able to use the -PR option.

I find fping useful; among other things, it will ping a range of addresses and list which are 'alive' and which are 'unreachable'. fping is not installed by default.

sudo apt-get install fping

The simple approach is to just run it over a range of addresses.

fping -g 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.254 2>/dev/null

A bit more elaborately, to produce a list of unused IPs.

fping -g 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.254 2>/dev/null | grep 'is unreachable' | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort -t '.' -k 4 -n

I believe it is not the best solution but it does what you want. This script runs ping over 192.168.0.0/24 network and returns list of inactive IPs if there are not in ARP cache.

Advantages over previous solutions:

• uses both methods: ping and ARP check
• no need to run as root user
• runs about 1.5min on my Core i3-2100

To scan your network run it with <first IP> <last IP> parameters.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from threading import Thread
import subprocess
from Queue import Queue

verbose = False

num_threads = 8
queue = Queue()
inactive_ips = [0 for i in range(256)]

lines = open("/proc/net/arp", "r").readlines()
arp_cache = [l.split()[0] for l in lines[1:] if l.split()[2] == "0x2"]

def ip_str_to_int(ip):
    ip = ip.rstrip().split('.')
    ipn = 0
    while ip:
        ipn = (ipn << 8) + int(ip.pop(0))
    return ipn

def ip_int_to_str(ip):
    ips = ''
    for i in range(4):
        ip, n = divmod(ip, 256)
        ips = str(n) + '.' + ips
    return ips[:-1] ## take out extra point


#wraps system ping command
def pinger(i, q):
    while True:
        ip_num = q.get()
        ip = ip_int_to_str(ip_num)
        if ip not in arp_cache:
            ret = subprocess.call("ping -c 1 %s" % ip,
                  shell=True,
                  stdout=open('/dev/null', 'w'),
                  stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
            if ret != 0:
                  inactive_ips[ip_num % 256] = ip
        q.task_done()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    from optparse import OptionParser
    usage = "usage: %prog [options] [first IP] [last IP]"
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true", dest="verbose", help="make lots of noise")
    parser.add_option("-q", action="store_false", dest="verbose", help="print only IP adresses")
    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    verbose = options.verbose

    first = ip_str_to_int(args[0] if len(args) > 0 else "192.168.0.1")
    last = ip_str_to_int(args[1] if len(args) > 1 else "192.168.0.254")

    if verbose:
        print "Scanning inactive network addresses from %s to %s" % (
            ip_int_to_str(first),
            ip_int_to_str(last))

    for i in range(num_threads):
        worker = Thread(target=pinger, args=(i, queue))
        worker.setDaemon(True)
        worker.start()

    for ip in range(first, last + 1):
        queue.put(ip)

    queue.join()
    for ip in inactive_ips:
        if ip:
            print ip

Update after downvote

I wrote it because nmap -PR 192.168.0.* did not work for me:

Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-10-06 15:34 EEST
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (0 hosts up) scanned in 0.03 seconds

Update 2

Fixed all the issues with ARP-cache.

This should do it right in bash:

#!/bin/bash

#setting language variables for subshell making sure we grep for the right word
LC_ALL=C
LANG=C

# retrieve IP from user input
read -p "Input your network (example: 192.168.0): " my_net

for i in $(seq 1 254);
do 
  ip="$my_net.$i"
  check="$(ping -c1 "$ip")"
  if [ "$(grep "Unreachable" <<<"$check")" != "" ]
  then
    echo "$ip is unreachable"
  fi
done

i think it is simpler

# my_net define my Net_ID
my_net=192.168.1.
for i in `seq 1 254`;
do 
  ip="$my_net$i"
  ping -c2  $ip | grep "is unreachable" | cut -d" " -f1 &
done