Ubuntu – How to identify and rectify IP address conflicts in Ubuntu

ip address

We have more than 500 machines running Ubuntu. I have noticed that many machines have IP address conflicts. Is it possible to identify IP address conflicts in Ubuntu?

  • See the output here.
  • What does it mean actually? I get same MAC address for all the IP addresses?

Best Answer

You can find them with arp-scan:

sudo apt-get install arp-scan

sudo arp-scan -I eth0 -l will show IP addresses, MAC address and manufacturer of the NIC and the line in the output that is a duplicate also identifies itself with a (DUP: 2) (where 2 is the second time this IP address is found for eth0.

Some possible options to make the search more specific:

  • Specify a list of IP addresses as arguments: sudo arp-scan -I eth0 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.3
  • Specify network/bits: sudo arp-scan -I eth0 192.168.1.0/24
  • Specify network:netmask: sudo arp-scan -I eth0 192.168.1.0:255.255.255.0
  • Specify address range: sudo arp-scan -I eth0 192.168.1.3-192.168.1.27
  • Read a list of IP addresses from a file: sudo arp-scan -I eth0 --file=ip-address-list.txt
  • sudo arp-fingerprint -o "--interface=eth0 --numeric" 192.168.1.111 displays the IP address, the binary fingerprint string, and a list of known systems that match this fingerprint: 192.168.1.111 01000100000 Linux 2.2, 2.4, 2.6

You can add |grep {part.of.ip.address} to limit the output (do not use wildcards but regular expressions if you need more exotic combinations).

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