5 ms·

Show HN: Findpi find raspberry pis on your network faster than NMAP

jamescampbell 7y ago
Hello all! I was sick of waiting for the arp / nmap commands to work single-threaded to find the raspberry pi's on my network. Also, arp only works for devices you have seen previously, so you could easily miss things. I posted benchmarks on the readme. Interested in feedback, suggestions, and please pull requests if you want to help improve it. Installs via pip and python 3x only! PS - since I am lazy, it also auto-suggests the network range you are connected to to be the network it searches, so you don't have to type it in.
- jjjbokma 7y ago
  What nmap command exactly did you use? I understand you can change the number of hosts it scans in parallel, see: https://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html https://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html Not a criticism, just curious.
  - jamescampbell 7y ago
    I thought I posted the command in the readme, nmap -sP. Yeah I remember reading about nmap adding parallelization. According to the link you shared: "By default, Nmap calculates an ever-changing ideal parallelism based on network performance". So my benchmarks are based on comparing against that. I don't know why my implementation is faster, but the three tests I performed show that findpi is faster. I guess because I am forcing more threads than nmap's ever-changing ideal is allocating?
- jjjbokma 7y ago
  You might want to add `DC:A6:32` to `checker`, see: https://udger.com/resources/mac-address-vendor-detail?name=raspberry_pi_foundation https://udger.com/resources/mac-address-vendor-detail?name=r...
  - jamescampbell 7y ago
    Thanks, interesting, I was going off of this, I thought, canonical list: https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd3e4 https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd... that only has the one Mac Address on it. I also found a second source to back up the claim that DC:A6:32 should be added as well here: https://dnslytics.com/mac-address-lookup https://dnslytics.com/mac-address-lookup by searching for Raspberry Pi. Thanks for pointing this out!
    - jamescampbell 7y ago
      Ah, just found it, https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/100513/36948 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/100513/36948 The Raspberry Pi 4 has the new standard mac address, so findpi would miss that right now! Will fix this and push 1.0.4 release asap.
      - jamescampbell 7y ago
        fixed and pushed, 1.0.4 released.
    - jjjbokma 7y ago
      You're welcome. I recently set up a wireless and headless pi [0] and recalled there where two ranges. [0] http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/10/17/wireless-headless-raspberry-pi.html http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/10/17/wireless-headless-raspb...
      - jamescampbell 7y ago
        That is a great guide as well, most of my setups are headless and wireless. Cheers
thepapanoob 7y ago
i would just use zmap since its not only for such a niche usecase :D
- jamescampbell 7y ago
  nice!

Hello all! I was sick of waiting for the arp / nmap commands to work single-threaded to find the raspberry pi's on my network. Also, arp only works for devices you have seen previously, so you could easily miss things. I posted benchmarks on the readme. Interested in feedback, suggestions, and please pull requests if you want to help improve it. Installs via pip and python 3x only! PS - since I am lazy, it also auto-suggests the network range you are connected to to be the network it searches, so you don't have to type it in.

jjjbokma 7y ago
What nmap command exactly did you use? I understand you can change the number of hosts it scans in parallel, see: https://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html https://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html Not a criticism, just curious.
- jamescampbell 7y ago
  I thought I posted the command in the readme, nmap -sP. Yeah I remember reading about nmap adding parallelization. According to the link you shared: "By default, Nmap calculates an ever-changing ideal parallelism based on network performance". So my benchmarks are based on comparing against that. I don't know why my implementation is faster, but the three tests I performed show that findpi is faster. I guess because I am forcing more threads than nmap's ever-changing ideal is allocating?
jjjbokma 7y ago
You might want to add `DC:A6:32` to `checker`, see: https://udger.com/resources/mac-address-vendor-detail?name=raspberry_pi_foundation https://udger.com/resources/mac-address-vendor-detail?name=r...
- jamescampbell 7y ago
  Thanks, interesting, I was going off of this, I thought, canonical list: https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd3e4 https://gist.github.com/aallan/b4bb86db86079509e6159810ae9bd... that only has the one Mac Address on it. I also found a second source to back up the claim that DC:A6:32 should be added as well here: https://dnslytics.com/mac-address-lookup https://dnslytics.com/mac-address-lookup by searching for Raspberry Pi. Thanks for pointing this out!
  - jamescampbell 7y ago
    Ah, just found it, https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/100513/36948 https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/100513/36948 The Raspberry Pi 4 has the new standard mac address, so findpi would miss that right now! Will fix this and push 1.0.4 release asap.
    - jamescampbell 7y ago
      fixed and pushed, 1.0.4 released.
  - jjjbokma 7y ago
    You're welcome. I recently set up a wireless and headless pi [0] and recalled there where two ranges. [0] http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/10/17/wireless-headless-raspberry-pi.html http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/10/17/wireless-headless-raspb...
    - jamescampbell 7y ago
      That is a great guide as well, most of my setups are headless and wireless. Cheers

thepapanoob 7y ago

i would just use zmap since its not only for such a niche usecase :D

jamescampbell 7y ago
nice!