LanScan 8.2.17 Mac

Zero. That is the cap on how many devices LanScan will report — it keeps going until it has found everything on the subnet. The scanner from iwaxx Sarl uses ARP packets to walk an IP range you define, from a single address to the full IPv4 space, and it does the same for IPv6 networks.

Where LanScan sits in the toolbox

Apple’s built-in tools give you snapshots. The Network Utility that once shipped with macOS is long gone, and the wireless diagnostics that remain do not inventory wired clients or virtual interfaces. Terminal commands such as arp -a return a raw table with no host names, no export, and no way to scan a custom range. LanScan fills that gap without overlapping with the tools a Mac user already has.

A three-step scan

1. LanScan auto-detects every configured interface — AirPort, Ethernet, Thunderbolt bridges and virtual adapters — and lists them on launch.
2. Pick an interface and set the IP range. The app defaults to the local subnet but lets you widen the scope to anything the network can reach.
3. Hit Scan. Results appear as a table where each column can be aligned individually. Host names resolve through DNS, mDNS and SMB, and if an SMB domain is configured, LanScan picks that up too.

Once the scan finishes, the table exports to a CSV file. There is also an option to open a custom URL in a browser, which teams use to hand device lists off to an internal asset tracker. The app runs natively on Apple Silicon and 64-bit Intel Macs and requires macOS 11 or later.

ARP requests trickle out one by one, not in bursts

Will it flood the network? That concern keeps coming up in IT Slack channels. LanScan sends ARP requests one at a time, not in bursts. On a /24 subnet the scan finishes in under a minute, and the traffic is indistinguishable from a machine asking “who has this IP?” Network monitoring tools do not flag it as a sweep unless you scan hundreds of subnets back-to-back — something the app does not automate.

Another frequent question is whether LanScan sees devices behind a router. It does not, and no ARP-based scanner will. ARP stays inside the broadcast domain, so devices on the other side of a NAT boundary stay invisible. People who need cross-subnet discovery pair LanScan with an agent on the remote segment or run it locally on a Mac connected to that network.

People also ask about VPN interfaces. LanScan lists them alongside physical adapters, but scanning across a VPN tunnel depends on whether the VPN pushes a routable subnet. If it does, the app treats it like any other interface. If the VPN assigns a single address with no local net, there is nothing to scan. The interface still appears in the list, which is handy for confirming that the tunnel is up before troubleshooting elsewhere.

On the privacy side, the question is always “can I hide the Mac vendor column?” Yes — every column toggles independently, so you can strip the table down to IP, MAC and host name before sharing a screenshot or CSV export.

How it works alongside other tools

LanScan does not try to replace a full network monitor. It is the reconnaissance step — the thing you run before opening Wireshark or firing up nmap. The CSV export is what makes it fit into a workflow. IT teams import the device list into a spreadsheet that cross-references known MAC prefixes against an asset register, flagging anything that should not be on the network.

The custom URL feature is underused but clever. Point it at a ticketing system and every IP row becomes a clickable link that pre-fills a new ticket with the MAC address. One university help desk configured it to open their inventory web app with the device details already in the query string. It saves the copy-paste step that otherwise eats five seconds per device.

With macOS features, LanScan coexists cleanly. It reads the same interface list that System Settings shows in the network pane, including virtual interfaces created by Parallels or Docker. The host name resolution pulls from the Mac’s own DNS cache, the local mDNS responder and any SMB domain the machine is bound to — so the names it shows match what Finder sees when browsing the network.

A /24 scan finishes in roughly 30 seconds over gigabit Ethernet

The scan itself is quick because ARP has almost no overhead. On a gigabit wired network, a full /24 scan completes in roughly 30 seconds. Wireless takes a little longer — closer to 45 seconds on a busy 5 GHz channel — but the difference is negligible. Public range scans using Ping and mDNS are slower by design, since they wait for timeouts on unresponsive addresses. Set the range to a /16 and expect to let it run while you grab coffee.

Memory use stays flat. The app holds the device table in RAM, and on a network with 200 active hosts it sits at around 35 MB. Scans that return thousands of devices push that figure higher, but the table is paged efficiently and Macs with 8 GB of RAM handle it without swapping. CPU load is similarly tame: a single core spikes to about 12 percent during the ARP sweep and drops to idle once results populate.

Stability has been a non-issue across several macOS releases. LanScan runs as a standard user app with no kernel extensions or low-level network hooks, so OS updates rarely break it. The developer has kept pace with Apple Silicon from the early transition days, and the native ARM build avoids the Rosetta 2 penalty that older networking tools still pay. On an M1 MacBook Air, the app launches cold in under two seconds and a scan starts immediately — no splash screen delay, no background service to wait for.

One workflow note worth mentioning: the app does not run scans in the background or on a schedule. It is a manual tool. People who need recurring discovery tend to pair a lanscan dmg install with a launchd script that triggers the export from the command line, but the GUI itself is single-shot by design. For most administrators, that is exactly right — a network scan is something you do when you need to know what is on the wire right now, not a process that hums along unattended.

• macOS 11 or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel 64-bit