How to Find the IP Address of Every Device on Your Network

You need a device's IP address more often than you'd think. To open the web page of your printer or NAS, to reserve a fixed address in the router, to set up a port forward, or simply to work out which box is causing trouble. In this video we'll find the address of every device on the network at once.

As in every video of this series, this is DeviceShelf's demo network, a made-up home with forty-four devices. On your own network you'll see your own devices.

The router's own device list is one way, but it often misses devices and shows cryptic names. A scan asks every address in your network directly. Click Scan, and within seconds the list fills up.

The IP address column is the one we're after. The list is sorted by it, so the router with the address ending in one comes first, followed by switches, access points, servers and so on.

Next to it you see the hardware address, also called the MAC address, and the vendor. The IP address can change over time. The MAC address belongs to the network chip and normally stays the same, so it's the better way to recognize a device.

Looking for a specific address? Type it into the filter. Here we typed one nine two, one six eight, one, dot two, and the filter shows every device whose address starts like that: the switch at dot two, and the NAS boxes and servers from dot twenty up.

Under Columns you can add the hostname, the name a device gives itself on the network. Together with the address, that's usually enough to tell which device is which.

Click a device for everything the scan knows about it: the IP address, the MAC address, the vendor, the hostname, the model and when it was first seen.

Under Technical there's more: the certificate of the device's encrypted web page, and a list of every name it has been seen with. A device can call itself one thing to the router and another in its own announcements, which is why the same box shows up under different names in different apps.

And if the device has a web page, Open web UI takes you straight there, without typing the address into the browser yourself.

Now the bigger picture. Open Network. Here is this computer's own address, the subnet and the gateway, which is your router. The subnet one nine two, one six eight, one, zero, slash twenty-four means: all addresses from dot one to dot two hundred fifty-four belong to this network.

Further down, the Addresses section checks three things the scan already knows. Duplicate addresses: two devices answering on the same address. That causes exactly the kind of problem where a device works one minute and is gone the next.

The DHCP pool: the range of addresses your router hands out automatically. DeviceShelf works it out from the addresses it sees. If you know the range from your router's settings, enter it below.

And fixed addresses inside the pool. A device with a hand-configured address in the middle of the automatic range can collide with the next phone that joins. The fix is to move the fixed address outside the pool, or to reserve it in the router.

Whether an address is fixed or handed out for a while is something only the router knows. Connect your router under Settings, Scanning: a FRITZ!Box, UniFi, OPNsense and many others. DeviceShelf then takes the names from the router's list, shows whether each address is a lease or a fixed reservation, and adds devices the scan can't reach.

Under Settings, Alerts, you can be told when a device changes its address. To avoid noise, DeviceShelf only alerts when a device kept the same address for at least three days and then shows up at a new one in two scans in a row. Phones, tablets and the router are left out.

Either way, the timeline records every change, so you can look up later which address a device had last week.

To keep the list somewhere else, Settings, General has an export: CSV for a spreadsheet, JSON or XML for scripts, and an HTML or PDF report to print. And if you like things tidy, Device labels prints a sheet of QR stickers with the IP address of each device, to stick on the box itself.

So: one scan gives you the IP address of every device, together with its MAC address and vendor. The Network view shows the address plan and warns about duplicates and fixed addresses in the wrong place. Connect your router to see leases and reservations, and let DeviceShelf tell you when an address changes.

More videos on finding devices, bandwidth and security are on our channel. DeviceShelf runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, at deviceshelf dot app.