Have you ever wanted to find out which computers are on your local network, what their IP addresses are (if you’re using DHCP), and what their hostnames are? Well, I’ve written a PowerShell script to do just that!

You can find it on GitHub, here.

Essentially, the script does one of two things.

If the Prefix parameter is supplied, it attempts to find all hosts in the last octet range (0-255) that are up (e.g.: that respond to pings) and then uses DNS to attempt to resolve the IP address to a known hostname. This can be especially useful for things like trying to find your Plex server, if your router has restarted and you don’t have a static IP address assigned for it.

If the Prefix parameter is not supplied, we attempt to obtain the first IP address available to the system (indexing by zero from the array) and use that range (e.g.: 192.168.0.x) to find the local hosts that are up (e.g.: responding to pings) and attempt to resolve their names in DNS.

The script takes some time to process the entire range and that’s because I didn’t want to deal with trying to add to a collection in a thread-safe manner due to parallelisation in PowerShell. It would be easy enough to do in C# and, if there’s a lot of interest in that, I could devote some time to writing this to be a dynamic-link library, instead.

For now, I hope it does someone some good, at the very least. 🙂