Finding the IP address of a WAP

[kaphc]

I'm at a school with various unmanaged Wireless Access Points and am tidying up the existing set up (reserving IP addresses etc)

 

One is a Netgear 802.11g ProSafe Wireless Access Point and I am trying to work out what IP address it has. I know the MAC address from the device but it's not showing up on DHCP - so I thought maybe it had a fixed IP address outside of the DHCP scope, but the MAC address is not showing up on arp -a either. It's clearly working as there are laptops in the same room getting a strong signal from it, and I've run Wifi Analyser from my phone and it's picking up a device with that MAC address and getting a good signal. It's not the default address (192.168.0.229) either.

 

I'm trying to figure out how the heck it's been set up. Does anyone have any ideas of how I can find out?

[Steve21]

Depending how it's setup. Do you know which switch it goes back to? If so you could check the port information on the switch.

 

Do you know your IP ranges? If so could run an IP scan on it, and generally it's fairly easy to pick out the WAPs based on their name.

 

If you're planning to change the settings anyway, might it not be easier just to default the point? Generally seems adding in a few settings like gateway/wireless key, might be easier than searching through lots of IPs etc

 

Steve

[glennda]

do an arp -a from a PC it may well be listed.

[Geoff]

Find an IP that's unallocated and manually assign the AP's mac address to that ip in your local arp table.

 

arp -s  

[Oaktech]

also consider running cain on the ip range and see what comes up.

[twin--turbo]

The management port IP of the AP may be irrelivent to it's operation. So it could be on any IP address.

 

Rob

[jamesreedersmith]

Have a look with advanced IP Scanner - scan your whole subnet and if its there it should find it!

[CyberNerd]

Find an IP that's unallocated and manually assign the AP's mac address to that ip in your local arp table.

 

arp -s  

 

Genius. This is so obvious - but in all my time it never occurred to me to do this.

Thanks Geoff !!!

[kaphc]

Cheers, some great ideas here for me to go on.

 

Advanced IP scanner is being blocked from download by the proxy server here, but assigning it an IP address via the arp command sounds like a good route - I'll have another look at it when I'm at that school this afternoon.

 

I may have to hard reset it as well anyway, as there's no documentation in the school about the credentials to log in and manage the AP (and the other netgear one they have) and I'm running out of good guesses to try. Then again, if both appear to be working fine, I might leave this well alone for now.