Tracking Devices connected over a network using NMAP and cron services.
A simple application that would help an user keep track of the devices connected over a network. It uses the capabilities of a tool called NMAP and a very simple logic to deduce the MAC address and the device connected over the network.
NMAP (Network Mapper) is a command that can help users discover hosts and services on a computer network. I have used NMAP as a service in my application to identify devices that are connected over the network. To install NMAP within your system I would suggest my viewers to install ZENMAP which is just a GUI wrapper over the NMAP command. It would help harness the capabilities of NMAP over a light weight GUI. To get ZENMAP installed in your system just follow the link. Since I am using a mac environment to set up my application I just downloaded the required version of Zenmap, extracted it and placed it in my application directory. But before installing the application NMAP into your mac please check that your machine has the permission to install applications outside your app store. To do that just visit System Preferences -> Security -> Click on "Anywhere" To check whether NMAP has properly been installed in your machine just run the command nmap --version.
In this application I have taken a dump of NMAP output in an xml format using the parameter -oX. The NMAP command looks like this nmap -sP -n -oX - <ip_address>/24 | tee nmap.xml. You can use the parameter -oN to output the desired result in a text format as well.
The MAC_IDENTIFIER directory has a java logic written that would extract the MAC Address and the device name connected over the network. A BufferedReader object would contain the required nmap dump which can be iterated to get the corresponding mac address of the device connected over the network and the device name as well.
The TRACKER_EXECUTE directory has two shell scripts. run_nmap.sh would run the nmap command and dump the entire log into a file called nmap. The JAVA logic written utilises this dump to iterate the MAC address and the device name. Then comes the logic for Extractor.sh, it simply traverses to the MAC_IDENTIFIER directory, compiles and executes the java class. In the corresponding shell script run_nmap.sh I have used the IP address of my network. Please make sure to enter the ip address of your respective network.
Now comes, the interesting part of setting a cron job to automate the entire process.
Under the root directory I have another shell executed that basically runs my two processes of dumping the nmap log and iterating the java logic there after.
UNIX and LINUX by default provides a default service called crontab that helps in executing services periodically. I have a cron job set that would run this task_runner logic every after 30 minutes. Here is the logic for it.
*/30 * * * * /Users/soumyajit/Documents/git_repos/target_mac/task_runner.sh > /Users/soumyajit/Documents/git_repos/target_mac/task_runner.log 2>&1
N.B: I have configured the cron so that I get the redirected output of the terminal into a log file called task_runner.log.
Crontab utility is a program that would run applications or scripts within a system at a certain interval of time. It basically has 4 modes of working which includes:
crontab -e: Suggests editing the current crontab in the system.crontab -l: Displaying the current version of the crontab.crontab -u: Specifying the name of the user whose crontab is to be tweaked.crontab -r: Removes the current crontab for the user.