What is Fping?

Fping is a network scanning tool that you can use to do a ping sweep on a range of IP addresses and list the machines (hosts) that reply. This is an equivalent to Nmap‘s host discovery scan, with a few differences.

Contrary to Nmap that requires sudo priviledges for some scans, you can run Fping without admin rights.
Also, Fping will help you narrow down the scan results if Nmap returns too many false positives.

To run a scan using the CIDR notation:
fping -a -g 192.168.22.0/24

To run a scan using an IP address range:
fping -a -g 192.168.22.0 192.168.22.255

The -a flag limits the results to alive hosts only.
The -g flag indicates we want to do a ping sweep, not a standard ping.

When running Fping on a local network you are directly attached to, you will get this message for offline hosts: ‘ICMP host unreachable’.
You can avoid this by redirecting the process standard error to /dev/null:
fping -a -g 10.54.12.0/24 2>/dev/null

Details? Here’s the full story: fping.org.

Hi! I'm a tech journalist, getting my feet wet in ethical hacking. What you will find here is me taking notes on the tools and techniques I’m learning and offering answers to the questions I had when I first got started not so very long ago.

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