How do I find the list of all hostnames on a network?

[KrazyHorse]

It's a network of a bunch of different computers which are all running linux and which share a filesystem (in other words, my home/mmcevoy folder is identical on all computers in the network). I'm sshed into one of the old hosts. I know they added new computers to the network, but I don't know what they called them. I checked the /etc/hosts file, but it only lists the hostname for the one I'm actually logged into.

Is there any file which will contain a list of all hostnames on the network, or is there any command which will bring up a list of the available hosts?

[Ari Rahikkala]

A cheapass way that I could think of is... find out the broadcast address for the network (/sbin/ifconfig helps, it probably ends with 255), ping that, and ask for the name of every host that responds. This line worked on the system where I tested it:

ping -b -c 2 130.231.243.255 | grep "bytes from" | cut -d " " -f 4-| cut -d : -f 1|xargs -n 1 host

[Thue]

I think you normally specifically design DNS servers so that you can't get a list of hostnames on a network. So you have to do a broadcast ping on the network and see who answers.

You can of course also see the local DNS server configuration, if the machines have subdomain names.

You can get the list of computers to which you have a connection by running

netstat -t

If you run that on the computer from which the directory is mounted then you should get a list.