DIYbanter - View Single Post - For the ip gurus How to get ip address if you only have the mac address

wrote:
Christian McArdle wrote:

We have a couple of D-Link print servers. We can determine the mac
address from the label on the underside, but we think thet we must have
given them fixed ip addresses (back in the mists of time).

Try arp -a if you're lucky.

Christian.

Should have said, tried arp -a

It returned some interesting looking stuff on my machine on the live
network, so I tried it on the mini network (1 hub, 1PC, 1 Print
Server).

It returned nothing. But then there is no dns server etc, etc running
on the PC at present.

arp -a simply dumps the ARP cache of the local machine. If the local
machine hasn't talked to the printer recently, the printer won't be in
the ARP cache.

Try a broadcast ping: something like

ping 255.255.255.255

which will get everything on the network to reply _then_ do arp -a

Cheers,

Simon.