Any Net Op or Sys Op worth their salt has Nmap in their arsenal of tools. Nmap is a very powerful network tool that’s been around for a good long time with its roots in UNIX. My first time using it was on a Sun SPARC 20 running SunOS more than a decade ago. (Ouch, did I just date myself?) While not the prettiest thing on earth, it may just be the most powerful.

But what if you don’t need all the power of Nmap and you don’t feel like compiling it to run on the Mac? Then the good folks at 10base-t (we’ve already told you about their excellent DropCopy application — we’re beginning to fall in love with these guys) has something just for you. It’s called IP Scanner. Ya, not as sexy (in a geek sense) as Nmap, but to the point no doubt.

IP Scanner is a shareware software that will scan your network in one quick sweep. It will look for various devices on your network, such as Windows, Linux, and Mac hosts. It will also find routers, switches, and printers. If IP Scanner is unsure what it found, it’ll announce that in the table view and allow you to double click the name to see more details about it. One device on our network looked like it was a router but we couldn’t figure out where this additional router we didn’t know about came from. Well the details page shed some light for us when we saw that the Manufacturer was Sonos. Ya, it was our ZP100. We also identified our NAS by this method, too. Very nice.

What we did miss, however, was our Airport. It didn’t show up. It was plugged into our Sonos ZP100 and we don’t know if that had something to do with it, but it was on the same sub-net, so it should have found it. Maybe the Sonos hides it, though we did the scan from our MacBook Pro which was attached to the AirPort, so you’d think it would have seen it being it was the actual device that was getting us on the network.

If you’re a person in need of a quick and easy network scanner to just see what’s on the network, IP Scanner is a great tool to have. For $25, even the curious could grab this and get a deal out of it. As an added bonus, 10base-t throws in IP Broadcaster which not only announces who you are with some more detail (for IP Scanner and like software) but also adds a menu item that reveals either your LAN or WAN address. Oh ya, you also get some daemon action, too (Net Ops will love this.) Good times.

If you have two or more Macs on a network that you commonly need to copy files to and fro, then you’ve probably set up a few aliases to network drives to help with your file transfers. But setting those up and maintaining them after system boots and all can be a pain in rear. Macs are suppose to be easy. So what gives?

Don’t worry, be happy. DropCopy is here and it’s free. With DropCopy, from the very cooly named 10base-t company, you can copy files by simply dragging your files to a faint black dot on your desktop. Once you “touch” the black hole, a pop-up list of all the other Macs running DropCopy pops up. Either user name or computer appear…or both. The file starts copying itself to the dropped user/computer and a progress meter starts ticking off. Once completed, you will hear (if chosen in the preferences) confirmation and your dropped host will now have that file. Piece of cake. Kind of.

While testing the freeware application, SvenOnTech found one MacBook Pro on our network that would not appear in DropCopy on either our other MacBook Pro or our Mac mini. We did everything. Even though the firewall on the troubling MBP was off, we added the suggested port to both TCP and UDP. We restarted the File Sharing service. We disconnected from AirPort and reconnected. We changed the domain to match the other two units. Man, we did it all but still, nothing. Now here’s the kicker, the problematic MBP could see us and it was able to copy a file over. No problem for him. So we know it’s something on his MBP. We blame his Boot Camp install.

So what ever the reason, no biggy. He’ll be leaving our network Sunday and he can figure out the problem when he gets back to Texas. Maybe there it’ll work for him. Heck, maybe we’ll be able to get the Internet option to work (wouldn’t that be ironic?).

We are indeed happy that this does work on the two Macs that really need it. Getting our old PowerBook to jump into the fun would be great, too! In the end, this is a free utility and outside of that one Texas bandit, this works. We’re happy. Really, we are.

Update: We spoke to 10base-t about the problem with our MacBook Pro not wishing to show himself and based on our conversation with them, it sounds like the MBP in question may be having Bonjour issues. We do know that DropCopy does work for two reasons. One, he (the MBP) can see all of our DropCopy hosts on the network and, two, when we added him as a Local Host (manual host addition), we successfully transferred files to his MacBook Pro. So, it would appear that this is not a DropCopy issue. Just keep this in mind if you experience the same issue.