ip-scanner

ip-scanner is one of the first tools I ever published, and it’s still my most-starred repo. It sweeps a range of IPv4 addresses, finds which ones answer, and shows them on a colourful dashboard right in the terminal.

How it works

• You give it a start and end address. A set of nested loops walks every address in between, carrying correctly across octets (so 10.0.0.250–10.0.1.5 works).
• Each address gets its own thread that runs ping -c1. If the host answers, the thread records its address and round-trip time.
• To avoid drowning the machine, the scanner caps itself at about 200 live threads and waits for some to finish before starting more.
• Interface.py draws an ASCII-art logo and a live grid of hosts, coloured by whether they’re up, down or just came online, redrawn in place with ANSI escape codes.

cd ip-scanner
python3 Interface.py

There’s also a small companion script, Sexton.py, for macOS. It walks through static IPs on a local network until it finds one that gets internet access, and offers to switch back to DHCP when you press Ctrl+C.

Looking back

It’s very much a 2019 student project: shelling out to ping, results passed through a text file, lots of threads instead of async I/O. If I wrote it today I’d use asyncio or raw ICMP sockets and keep results in memory. But it taught me threads, terminal drawing and a lot about how networks behave, and ideas from it live on in ocpanel.

Status

Archived. Last touched in 2022.