The network discovery software Fing has been born out of the ashes of the much acclaimed Look@Lan network monitoring and discovery software. The project is still in an early stage and comes with a command line version for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh operating system. This might turn away users who do not like working with the command line. The interactive mode that has been build into the network discovery software on the other hand might convince them to give it a try nevertheless.
Fing can be run with a single command from the command line or started in interactive mode which basically consists of a series of questions and simple answers provided by the user. The first question for example after starting the interactive mode is about the mode the software should run in. Options are discovery, scan or infos.
- Discovery: Will start the network discovery module. The user has to pick a network adapter and answer several additional questions. Fing will generate a network discovery report in the end.
- Scan: Provides the means to scan a remote host, will display ports, services and firewalls running on that server.
- Infos: Displays information about local and remote networks.
Fing offers a selection of output formats such as text, html or csv that can either be displayed directly in the console or saved in a file on the local computer system.
Verdict:
Fing is a fast network discovery tool for command line junkies. The export functionality and speed are excellent, a graphical user interface would be desirable nevertheless.
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Though I’m not exactly a command line person, still I’m gonna give this tool a run on my machine. Thanks for sharing.
The name is a bit unfortunate as it means ‘fart’ in hungarian :)
Does this tool offer any advantages over nmap?