(Music)
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister,
and welcome to another ScreenCasts Online
weekly tip video.
Now this week's tip might appeal to the more techy
amongst you as it features a tool to allow you
to examine your local network
and the devices currently using it.
This can be really useful if you need to find out
information about your devices,
but it's also fun to see just how many
network devices you have in your home or office.
The application is called Fing.
So this is Fing installed on my iPad.
If you're concerned at all about privacy,
then you might want to check out Fing's privacy policy.
You can get to that by going to settings,
and you can actually have a read about it
by tapping on this thing down at the bottom.
But what I'm going to do because I'm going to expose
some of the IP addresses of my devices,
which they're all local IP addresses so that's fine,
but the MAC addresses, the physical address
of the devices, I'm actually gonna switch on privacy mode
so that's gonna hide the last part of my MAC address
that you see on screen.
Now if you're not sure what IP addresses are
and what MAC addresses are, et cetera,
perhaps this isn't a tip for you,
but if you have some understanding about local area networks
you might find this app interesting.
So I'm gonna say done to my settings.
I can see my network here, which is my local area network,
HS network five gigahertz.
I've got my local IP address here,
192.168.0.0,
and if I just tap on here you'll see
there are 37 devices connected to my local area network.
Now it's intelligent enough and by the way,
you can ignore this bar at the top.
This is just prompting me to sign
and create a Fing account.
I haven't actually done that as yet.
Now there's also a thing called a Fingbox
which is under development
which will give you some more information about
your local network devices.
But again, I'm just using the free version,
I'm not using a Fing account.
This is just the application analysing
what's happening in my network locally.
So you can see here I've got my Apple TV in the kitchen,
I've got a Netgear Switch,
I've got a Philips Hue bridge for some Philips light bulbs.
I've got an Airport Extreme,
upstairs I've got an Airport Express.
In the living room I've got another Apple TV.
In the studio, my Apple TV, et cetera, et cetera.
Now you can go through and you can have
a look at all your devices.
If you want to examine a device,
let's go ahead and examine this living room Apple TV.
Okay, I can see that the device is online.
Oh I can if I want to document these further,
give them a name, add additional notes
or enter where the device is located,
so let me do that.
I can scan the services on the box.
If I tap scan services it will go away,
interrogate the box, and let me know
what services are running on that particular box.
Now this is good if you've got laptops
or any other devices that you want to see
what sort of services are available on those devices.
So it's 26% through, 30% through,
it's not picked up anything as yet,
so this might not be a good example to show you,
but we'll let that run through to the end,
there should be some services available.
Okay, so that's completed, Rendezvous
which I think has been renamed Bonjour by Apple.
UPNP, that's universal plug'n'play protocol
and Apple File Service file server.
There's also a font service,
there's also an iPhone sync service.
Presumably that's the new service whereby
you can configure Apply TV by tapping it with your iPhone.
But yeah, very interesting.
Let's come back out of here.
I can ping the device.
If it supports wake on LAN it a wake on LAN packet
to enable it, remove device,
and also have a look at the event log.
And this yellow block is all about the Fingbox
which you can check out if you tap on the link
about getting your Fingbox.
Down at the bottom, my local IP address,
the actual MAC address of the device,
and I can see the services down here as well.
Okay, so that's just one device.
So you can actually go through
and have a look at all your devices.
Let's just check one of the devices,
let's say this Airport Extreme.
If I tap on here again, I can scan the services,
ping it, wake on LAN, remove device, et cetera,
and see all the details here at the bottom.
It is useful sometimes if you're trying to track down,
if you don't recognise an IP address on your network
and you want to see which device it is
you can use this to track it down.
Or again for security you can go ahead,
scan services, and see exactly what services
are running on any particular box.
So that one's just running two different services.
Okay, let's come out of here.
So down at the bottom, access to your devices,
access to your networks, access to some tools,
so if you want to scan an IP address or domain
you can do that directly from here
and then again, more information about this Fingbox.
I just find it has been very useful.
I mean obviously it's not something you'll use every day,
now and again when I want it to troubleshoot
something on the network it's proved
to be really really useful.
But that's Fing, available on the Mac app store.