Listing all the machines alive on a network

When we deal with a large local area network, we may need to check the availability of other machines in the network. A machine may not be alive in two conditions: either it is not powered on, or due to a problem in the network. By using shell scripting, we can easily find out and report which machines are alive on the network. Let's see how to do it.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use two methods. The first method uses ping and the second method uses fping. fping is easier to use for scripts and has more features as compared to the ping command. Usually it won't be shipped with your Linux distribution by default, so manually install it using your package manager.

How to do it...

Let's go through the script to find out all the live machines on the network and alternate methods to find out the same.

1. The first method is as follows:

   We can write our own script using the ping command to query a list of IP addresses and check whether they are alive or...