How to find the IP Address of A new Network Device.

When you add a new device to an existing network it will generally be configured to get an IP address from a DHCP server.

On most home networks this will generally be the home router unless you have configured yours differently.

Therefore to find the IP addresses of devices on your home network you will need to go to the DHCP server and look at the IP assignments.

dhcp-client-list

There may be many entries in the list and what you are looking for is a entry with a long expiry time as that will indicate that has been recently assigned.

The expiry time on most DHCP server is 24 hours by default.I have circled an entry above with a time of 23 hours as an illustration.

Assigning Static Addresses

Once you have found the IP address it is common to assign static addresses to the devices that require management like IP cameras.

This again is done on the home router and is also covered in the video above.

Whenever possible I would avoid assigning static addresses on the device itself as they are difficult to manage.

You should also update your network documentation.

Here is a video showing how to do it:

However usually access to the DHCP sever assignments requires admin access.

As an alternative you can us a network tool to locate new and existing devices.

Pinging all Available Network Addresses

Almost all home networks use IPv4 as the main transport protocol and fortunately my networks use a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 which limits the network to 256 devices.

There are network tools available that will ping each of these addresses in turn and give a list of discovered devices.

I have developed a node-red flow that does that and it is available below.