ARPing – Ping using Address Resolution Protocol(ARP)

ARPing is an utility that can be used to ping using ARP requests instead of using ICMP as used in standard Ping utility.

Because it involves ARP, arping is limited to the local network to which the server or the interface (if more than one interface) is connected to. ARPing can be quite useful to

• Check if an IP Address is already in use before assigning to another device
• Duplicate address detection
• Update neighbors ARP cache

There are two arping versions,

1. arping as a part of iputils in Linux
2. arping2 from Thomas Habets using libcap and libnet

arping2 is considered a better version than the iputils version. arping in iputils cannot send a "Who has what MAC Address" packet and works only in Linux, most of UNIX versions while arping2 can work on of the Linux, UNIX operating systems and can work on Windows.

Example:

using ARPing (iputils)

ARPING 192.168.0.1 from 192.168.0.10 eth0
Unicast reply from 192.168.0.1 [00:01:80:38:F7:4C]  0.510ms
Unicast reply from 192.168.0.1 [00:01:80:38:F7:4C]  0.601ms
Unicast reply from 192.168.0.1 [00:01:80:38:F7:4C]  0.610ms
Unicast reply from 192.168.0.1 [00:01:80:38:F7:4C]  0.605ms
Sent 4 probes (1 broadcast(s))
Received 4 response(s)

Using ARPing (libcap and libnet version)

arping2 00:01:02:03:04:05
arping2 192.168.0.10

For more details and download of arping2, click here

For a iputils version of arping man page, click here