nmap based device tracking plugin

[trainman419]

My router isn't supported, so I wrote a tracker plugin based on nmap.

[balloob]

Hey!

I'm new to nmap, but it seems to be a network discovery tool, correct? And so this will use that tool to scan a fixed list of hosts that you define in your config to see if they are online.

Some questions that crossed my mind:

Would this require the user to have assigned static addresses for each of their devices? If so, we want to mention this in the documentation.

Is there a reason why you use the nmap tool and not just ping. If we have static addresses this seems to be a solution with way less dependencies? Would it be even possible to just use the arp -a command to scan which devices are known or is that not up to date enough? (Please note, I'm not familiar with these tools)

Travis reports a few style violations. Once those are fixed I'll merge it. Thanks for your contribution!

[trainman419]

Here's the config I'm using for the nmap_tracker:

[device_tracker]
platform=nmap_tracker
hosts=192.168.1.1/24

nmap is a network discovery tool. Here, I'm using it to send pings to all devices on the local subnet, and get back the list of devices that are nearby, and maybe their hostnames. Once I have the list of IP addresses, I can use arp to resolve those IP addresses to mac addresses. This means that the device detection is still based on MAC address, and not based on IP.

arp -a isn't appropriate here, for two reasons:

• it has different meanings on OSX and Linux. Note that I'm using a regex to parse the output instead of assuming a fixed output format.
• it only dumps the arp cache; it doesn't query the IP address of every host on the network.

It's probably possible to do this using ping or individual arp queries, instead of nmap. I chose nmap because it is very good at managing multiple queries and scanning an entire network with a single command.

I'll take a look at the style violations. I don't spend much time in python, and I haven't worked with python3 at all.

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-1.89%) when pulling 6b436344159e450adadb4f33f3cbf1c49a15667d on trainman419:nmap_tracker into 7c404a0 on balloob:master.

[trainman419]

I've cleaned up the style warnings and squashed the commits back into a single commit.

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-1.89%) when pulling 4495812 on trainman419:nmap_tracker into 7c404a0 on balloob:master.

[balloob]

One last thing, could you add some explanation and your example config to the README.md file in the wireless router section (Line 76) ? (Yeah I know the readme is getting out of control, might switch over to some better documentation soon but this should do for now)

[trainman419]

Ok; I've added docs to the readme and to the example config.

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-1.89%) when pulling a49c839 on trainman419:nmap_tracker into 7c404a0 on balloob:master.

[balloob]

Awesome! Thanks