Finding the IP address of a device on your network is generally an easy thing to do. This isn’t always the case when the device is a network device or share using mDNS, also known as Bonjour on OSX.

If you know the network name of the device, you can use the dscacheutil to query the device and get it’s IP address.

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dscacheutil -q host -a name [network name].local

For example, I have a NAS on my network but the nas requires an older display connector that I generally don’t keep around. Unfortunately it lives on a network to which we don’t control the IP space. When the IP of the device changes, its not been so easy to find it’s address. This is what I used to find it’s IP.

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$ dscacheutil -q host -a name storjnas.local
name: storjnas.local
ip_address: 10.150.50.50
ip_address: 10.150.50.50