When managing multiple machines over a network, it becomes necessary to check if they are reachable, whether they can be accessed as required and overall are working as expected.
Advanced IP Scanner 2.0 is a free Windows based application that scans all the machines on a specified network, lists them, provides a central point for accessing shared folders and can access them either through FTP, HTTP and HTTPS. Above all, it is free to download and use. The description of the program is here. You can download program here .
Once downloaded, installation is straight forward. Follow the setup wizard and let it complete.
For using it, specify a subnet or network range that you want to scan. There are two buttons labelled IP and C. Clicking on IP will scan the subnet to which the current machine belongs while C will scan the class C subnet.
Once scan is complete or stopped, various tasks can be performed for any of the listed machines. Simply right click on any specific machine and either explore it’s shared resources, shut it down, abort shut down or use the Wake-On-LAN option to wake it up.
Even accessing the listed machines through telnet, HTTP or HTTPS is possible by clicking the Operations tab.If Radmin remote access software is used, it is easy to control remote nodes through the Radmin options listed (like take full control, chat, voice chat, send message etc).
One handy feature in Advanced IP Scanner is the ability to store entire lists of scanned machines as Favorites. They can be added to Favorites tab or the list as a whole can be exported to .xml file which can be imported if all these machines need to be scanned again.
The Settings > Options menu is used for configuring how the scanning will be done as well as what services will be scanned.
The Performance tab is used to change the CPU usage (more CPU usage for faster scans and lower usage for slower scans). Enabling the High accuracy scanning option will lower the scan speed but will be more thorough.
The Resources tab provides what resources can be enabled or disabled during scanning. It is better to turn off services that are not required during scan (like say not enabling “Scan Radmin availability” if it is not installed to save time during scans).
To sum it up, Advanced IP Scanner is a lightweight, easy to use, feature-rich IP scanner for Windows and for a price that you can’t beat – free . 🙂
Happy IP scanning!