Any suggestions for a low-cost freeware network discovery tool?

[mpwa]

We already have an in-house asset management system in-place and would like a tool that can be used for periodic independent audit of network segments.

During an audit cycle we would like to survey one or more subnets to discover servers and services that are not in a list of "known" servers.

As full-on inventory front-ends such as Peregrine's Network Discovery tool appears to be overkill as we will not be maintaining an asset-base ourselves.

Any suggestions appreciated

 

[paleogryph]

I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but hey, I'm looking for the same thing for the same reasons. Commercial grade discovery tools are overkill and overpriced. For a relatively small (< 100 users) network I need something that will do the job without breaking the bank.

 

[bws1]

Well, if you're just looking for a basic network discover too, I would highly recommend look@lan, besides it's either freeware or share ware and it will sweep any IP domain ranges that you supply. Plus, you can drill down to a fairly decent degree to each workstation to see what ports are open, and what protocols are being used and whether or not the unit you're looking at is windoze based or not.

I would also recommend LANguard Network Scanner. It's pretty cool too.

Hope this helps

 

[kevinnaomi]

Dameware is also another.
Very cheap and easy to use.

http://www.dameware.com

 

[Spirit]

Free AIDA32. Tried to get this to work but to no avail, you might have more luck.

I have just rolled out visual audit from visionsoft. It took about 2 hours from unpacking the product to printing a full network (Hard ware and software) audit. That was for my UK site of about 100 PC's. It costs around £500 but is well worth it.

But I also use dameware (which is very cheap) it has excellent discovery skills but it doesn't export a lot of the info you might need / want to report on.

Any help?

Iain