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If you need to install it again on Ubuntu or another Linux distro featuring the APT package manager, install the dnsutils package: sudo apt install dnsutils Nslookup comes preinstalled on all major operating systems. View hardware-related information about the host. View information about the DNS A address records. Specify the time allowed for the server to respond. When nslookup is given an IP address, it will try to do a PTR lookup.Īs per the other reply, if the IP belongs to a Windows machine, you can also do nbtstat -A 10.31.46.Find all the important nslookup options in the following table. So to get the hostname of 10.11.12.13, we say to DNS "Give me the PTR record for 13.12.11.10.in-addr.arpa." The IP address in the PTR record is reversed.
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However, there is no obligation to store PTR records so they may not be present, in which case the lookup will fail. For each IP address, there is a PTR record in which is stored the associated hostname. In DNS this is achieved through PTR records. Once you have the IP address, you are relying on a name resolution service to do a reverse lookup and return a hostname that is associated with an IP.
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You can trigger arp requests manually by pinging every IP on the network, or using a utility like nmap to do them all in one go.
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In order for this to work, both devices must be on the same layer 2 network - the same switch/vlan. In order to populate that list, the machine will have had to at some point issued an arp request, saying "who has IP x.x.x.x" - the owner will reply and upon receipt, the arp table will be populated. As per the question, arp -a will list the MAC addresses and corresponding IP addresses. This means that you need access to a device that has the IP address associated with the MAC. If you start with a MAC address, you first need to get the IP address.
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