know IP address, need hostname

[Jeff Patrick]

From HP-UX, is there any way to tell the hostname of a system (Windows or UX) if I know its IP address? I can ping it, but it doesn't then show up on my arp -a, so I'm not sure where to get its mac address either. Thanks for your help.

[Christian Ching]

Have you tried
nslookup IP_address ?

[Christian Ching]

You can also simply try the
'hostname' command
hope this helps

[Victor BERRIDGE]

nslookup will work only if the hosts are declared in the DNS, or NIS, I know no other way than to try to connect => telnet will prompt you for login but will also tell you who he is and what system it is (exept NT...)

Regards

VB

[Albert E. Whale, CISSP]

Jeff,

There are a couple of tricks that haven't been expressed here yet, Some of them are the 'Backdoors' that Hackers may use, now and again.

Have you tried SNMP? If SNMP is running, you should be able to get it with:

snmpwalk system

IF that doesn't work, how about probing some of the Well Known Services? Have you attempted to knock on the SMTP door? Telnet? Those would be my first line of attempts to get information which was not readily available.

Hope that helps!

Have a Great Day!

[Mike McKinlay]

If you use

ping -a

from a Windows workstation, it performs the nslookup for you and resolves the address against your DNS.

[Rita C Workman]

From the UNIX box, nslookup will do it's search based on how and in what order your /etc/nsswitch.conf is set up . So check this file, make sure it's configured to try every possible avenue to check.

When you do a nslookup to the IP, you should see the name if it has been set up in your host file/DNS or NIS.

Just a thought,