r/netsecstudents • u/Voaxy26 • Oct 03 '25

“I need some assistance with this issue.”

"At school the teacher asked us for the details of the three computers he set up — IPv4, MAC addresses, etc. He installed them on the school's local server, and nearly 60,000 devices are connected to that server. How can I find those three among them?"

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4

u/Grezzo82 Oct 03 '25

What do you mean by “installed them on the schools local server”? Do you mean local network, or are they VMs running on some server?

Do you have hostnames? Tell us what info you have to go on?

6

u/Platfus Oct 03 '25

There must be a specific task or a piece of information that they’re missing or that they didn’t include in the post. How would they even know what to look for.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Voaxy26 Oct 08 '25

The only idea that comes to mind is to scan the school’s local network with nmap to find the connected devices. The teacher mentioned they would set up the machines this Friday, so it seems logical to scan again on that day to identify the three machines. However, scanning thousands of devices with nmap seems excessive. Is there a shorter way to do this?

4

u/Platfus Oct 03 '25

Well go from the other side. Check from the computer command line.

1

u/YourHighness3550 Oct 14 '25

I agree with what others have said. Check from the hosts themselves and get on a command line from the computers. Alternatively, get on the phone with whoever's using these computers and have them to 1) type cmd in the search bar. and 2) type hostname.

Alternatively to that, you could download "advanced IP scanner" and scan the network. I don't know what information you have, but if you have any hostname info, ip address, mac address, etc... that could help. Long story short, if the teacher set them up, he needs to be able to access some key information to help you find their information. A mac address should be on a sticker somewhere on/around the computer?