Host Addresses Specification

Host Address Specification step specifies answers "What to scan?" question. The definitive answer is a list of IP addresses and/or host names to be scanned.

The discovery is often performed in large network segments including hundreds or even thousands of addresses. Manual creation of IP lists by adding individual addresses one by one is a very tedious task in these circumstances. Therefore Iotellect Network Manager allows to specify ranges of addresses making its users' life a bit easier. Nevertheless the problem is not solved yet, as network administrators often deal with a big numbers of sub-networks, segments and address ranges, which are still exhausting to type in. Fortunately in most cases there's no need to specify the ranges by hand, as the information is already stored in networking devices, such as routers and switches. Iotellect Network Manager acquire network specifications via SNMP, and uses them to facilitate address specification procedure.

Thus the list of addresses to be scanned can be formed in three steps:

  • Specify Seed Router Addresses.
    Seed router is an SNMP-enabled router or switch that can be used to obtain information about IP subnets available in your network. Each of the specified seed routers is requested for network interfaces it supports, and then the interface addresses every network interface is associated with. As far as an interface address represents a network segment (or a subnet), Iotellect Network Manager gets all the subnets the router is aware of. They are included in the IP ranges and subnets list at the next step.
    Seed routers to be used are specified by IP Address or Host Name values together with SNMP Connection Properties used to acquire the required data from the router/switch.
  • Specify IP Ranges.
    There are two ways to specify an IP range:
  • By an IP address and network mask
  • By a pair (start and finish) of IP addresses.

    • All IP addresses belonging to the specified ranges will be added to the list of individual IP addresses to be edited at the following step.

  • Specify individual IP Addresses and Host Names.
    The user can edit a list of addresses by modifying, removing or adding a particular address.
    Considering that it's often unnecessary and even pointless to edit large list of addresses (e.g. automatically generated from IP ranges), system offers to skip this step if there are more than a thousand of addresses in the list.

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