Independent field guide
Survey the network you own, one address at a time.
Plain-English reviews and step-by-step walkthroughs for office managers, first-time IT staff and homelab tinkerers who need to know what is actually on their network. We review each tool from the vendor’s own documentation and public trials, host nothing ourselves and send you to the vendor’s own site.
- network gear
- device answered
- not yet identified
Independent. We are not Famatech, Fing, Lansweeper or any other vendor. Reviews are ours; trademarks are theirs.
No files here. Nothing on Scanlanmax can be run or installed. Every link goes to the maker’s own product page.
Your network only. Every walkthrough assumes you own the network or have written permission to survey it.
Map sheets
Three questions, three sheets
Most small-network jobs start with one of these questions. Each sheet compares the tools that answer it best.
Walkthroughs
Routes for common jobs
Written for the moment something odd happens on your network and you need a sequence of steps, not a feature list.
- How to check which ports are open on your own computerList listening ports on your own PC with netstat, Get-NetTCPConnection, lsof or ss, match them to programs, then confirm from a second machine.
- How to identify an unknown device on your own networkA patient, step-by-step way to put a name to that mystery entry on your home or office network: router lists, arp -a, MAC vendor lookups and Fing.
- Finding and fixing an IP address conflictWhy two devices end up with the same IP address on your network, how to find the second one with arp -a and Angry IP Scanner, and how to stop it recurring.
- Build a device inventory spreadsheet from a network scanTurn a scan of your own network into a living inventory sheet: which columns to keep, how to export from Advanced IP Scanner, and how to spot changes.
Gazetteer
Every tool on the map
An alphabetical index of the 9 tools we review. The grid reference points to the sheet each one lives on: A for IP scanners, B for port and service scanners, C for discovery and inventory.
Side by side
When two tools both look right
How we survey
The one yardstick every tool has to clear
We start from the same question for every tool: starting cold from the vendor’s own site, how long would it plausibly take a newcomer to reach a device list they would trust enough to file — and where do people who have actually run it say they got stuck? We weigh the vendor’s own documentation and any public demo or trial against what turns up in admin forums and support threads. Speed claims, feature counts and marketing pages come second to that yardstick.