The recent tip to use ping to find devices on your local network was new to me even though I've been using Un*x since the days of NeXTSTEP, so you shouldn't ever feel like there's a "too simple" tip when it comes to stuff like this. You never know who will learn something!
The tool I use to get a survey of my network devices is the freeware WakeOnLan, which is a nice GUI program and widget. It does a nice job of listing what devices are on your network, showing IP address, NetBIOS name (if available; if not you can put in your own), and MAC address number (note that's not short for Macintosh :-)
I haven't used any of the actual "Wake" functions of the program, but it does a good job listing devices that it finds.
[robg adds: I think we've got the network inventory methods covered now. The above-referenced hint is a one-command Unix statement; this hint is a Unix script that works with a Perl module, and finally, today's tip which works simply in the OS X GUI. In my testing, however, WakeOnLan didn't see all my network devices--in particular, the network printer was missing (even though ping showed it).]
The tool I use to get a survey of my network devices is the freeware WakeOnLan, which is a nice GUI program and widget. It does a nice job of listing what devices are on your network, showing IP address, NetBIOS name (if available; if not you can put in your own), and MAC address number (note that's not short for Macintosh :-)
I haven't used any of the actual "Wake" functions of the program, but it does a good job listing devices that it finds.
[robg adds: I think we've got the network inventory methods covered now. The above-referenced hint is a one-command Unix statement; this hint is a Unix script that works with a Perl module, and finally, today's tip which works simply in the OS X GUI. In my testing, however, WakeOnLan didn't see all my network devices--in particular, the network printer was missing (even though ping showed it).]
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