How to find a Raspberry Pi in your local network

If you have trouble finding the ip address of your Raspberry Pi connected to your local LAN, here is how to find it.

All the Raspberry Pi have a MAC address that starts with predefined values attributed to the device's vendor. For a Raspberry Pi these values can be :

28:CD:C1
2C:CF:67
3A:35:41
D8:3A:DD
DC:A6:32
E4:5F:01
B8:27:EB

Source :

We can use these values to detect the Raspberry Pi devices in a LAN.

Scan the network for all the connected devices that have a MAC address starting with any of these values :

$ sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24 | egrep -iB2 "(D8:3A:DD)|(B8:27:EB)|(28:CD:C1)|(2C:CF:67)|(3A:35:41)|(DC:A6:32)|(E4:5F:01)"
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.123
Host is up (0.073s latency).
MAC Address: D8:3A:DD:3F:38:B1 (Unknown)

A RPi has been found with IP 192.168.1.123 :

ssh username@192.168.1.123

Note : in the example above, replace 192.168.1.0/24 by your local LAN subnet. The most common subnets are :

192.168.0.0/24 : commonly used by many consumer-grade routers as the default LAN subnet.
192.168.1.0/24 : another popular default subnet for many routers.
10.0.0.0/24 : often used by some routers and larger networks for more flexibility in subnetting.
172.16.0.0/16 and 172.16.0.0/24 : used in some larger corporate or enterprise networks.

Create a bash script :

#!/bin/bash

if [ -z "$SUDO_USER" ]; then
    echo "This script must be run with sudo or as root."
    exit 1
fi
echo "Please wait..."
sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24 | egrep -iB2 "(D8:3A:DD)|(B8:27:EB)|(28:CD:C1)|(2C:CF:67)|(3A:35:41)|(DC:A6:32)|(E4:5F:01)"