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Use BB-Eco as a general network discovery tool

BB-Eco isn't just for Brainboxes hardware. The Network Neighborhood tab discovers anything on your LAN that announces itself — printers, NAS units, IP cameras, edge controllers, smart-home gear — using three industry-standard discovery protocols at once.

Useful when you walk into an unfamiliar site and need to know what's actually on the network before you start configuring anything.

BB-Eco Network Neighborhood tab showing six discovered devices grouped by role — three endpoints (Synology NAS, Brother printer, HP LaserJet), two industrial devices (Brainboxes ED-549, BB-400), one security device (Axis IP camera), with SSDP, mDNS, and WS-Discovery source badges

What it discovers​

BB-Eco listens passively on three protocols simultaneously and merges the results into one list:

ProtocolMulticast addressDevices that typically use it
SSDP / UPnP239.255.255.250:1900Smart TVs, NAS, routers, Brainboxes ED/ES/SW, media servers
mDNS / DNS-SD224.0.0.251:5353Apple devices, printers, Brainboxes BB-400, AirPrint, Chromecast
WS-Discovery239.255.255.250:3702IP cameras (ONVIF), Windows network shares, network printers

If a device speaks any of those, BB-Eco sees it. If a device speaks two or three (common for higher-end gear), BB-Eco merges the announcements into a single row and shows all the source badges.

How to use it​

  1. Open BB-Eco.
  2. Click the Network Neighborhood icon (the globe) in the left sidebar.
  3. That's it — devices appear as they announce themselves. No button to press, no scan to start. Discovery runs continuously.

The badge on the sidebar icon shows the live count, so you can see at a glance how many devices the network has revealed.

Reading a row​

Each device row shows:

  • IP address — links to the device's web UI if it has one
  • MAC address — useful for cross-referencing DHCP leases or asset databases
  • Friendly name / hostname — whatever the device advertises
  • Manufacturer — extracted from MAC OUI lookup or protocol metadata
  • Model — from protocol metadata where the device provides it
  • Role badge — BB-Eco categorises devices into Industrial, Infrastructure, Security, Endpoint, Smart Home, or Unknown based on signals like manufacturer, advertised services, and device class
  • Source badges — SSDP / mDNS / WS-Discovery, one per protocol the device announced on
  • BB badge — set when the device is identified as Brainboxes hardware, even when discovered as a "neighbor" rather than through the dedicated Brainboxes dashboard

Grouping and filtering​

The toolbar offers four ways to organise the list:

  • By role (default) — Endpoint, Industrial, Infrastructure, Security, Smart Home, Unknown
  • By subnet — useful when your laptop has multiple network interfaces
  • By source — separate columns for SSDP, mDNS, WS-Discovery — see which protocol each device speaks
  • By manufacturer — useful when you want to find every device from one vendor

The search box does substring matching across IP, MAC, hostname, manufacturer, and model.

Active CIDR scanning​

Passive listening only finds devices that announce themselves. To probe a subnet for everything that responds — including devices that don't announce — use the CIDR scan at the bottom of the Neighborhood tab:

  1. Enter a CIDR range (e.g. 192.168.16.0/22 or 10.0.50.0/24), or click an auto-detected VPN suggestion if you have an active tunnel.
  2. Click Scan.
  3. BB-Eco TCP-probes every host in the range on common HTTP/HTTPS ports (80, 443, 8080, 9000) and enriches each responder with the device's HTTP Server header and page title.

Scan progress shows live: scanned count, discovered count, elapsed time. Cancel any time. Results merge into the same list as the passive discoveries.

BB-Eco's Network Neighborhood tab running a CIDR scan of 192.168.16.0/22. The progress bar at the bottom advances from 0 to 1024 hosts as devices populate the list grouped by role — Endpoints (Synology NAS, HP printer), Industrial (Brainboxes ED-588, ED-549, ES-257), and Security (Axis camera). The Found counter ticks up alongside the Scanned counter.

Exporting the inventory​

The Export button in the toolbar saves the current device list as a CSV file. Useful for:

  • Site survey reports — hand over to the customer or document for your own records
  • Asset database imports — feed straight into your inventory tracker
  • Vulnerability triage — cross-reference manufacturer / model with CVE databases

The CSV includes every column visible in the UI plus the discovery source list (semicolon-separated when a device announced on multiple protocols).

When to reach for it​

  • Site walkthroughs — five minutes after plugging in your laptop you have a complete picture of what's on the network.
  • Asset inventory audits — periodic exports tracked in Git or a ticket system catch new devices as they appear.
  • Troubleshooting connectivity — if a device is "missing" from the Brainboxes dashboard, check the Neighborhood tab. If it's there but not the main dashboard, you've narrowed the issue.
  • Pen-test reconnaissance (with permission) — see what an attacker on the same subnet would see without sending a single packet.

Privacy note​

BB-Eco's Network Neighborhood is purely passive by default — it listens for multicast announcements that devices broadcast to anyone on the segment. No active probing happens until you explicitly run a CIDR scan. If you're on a network where active scanning would be a problem (production OT, customer sites without authorisation), don't run the scan; the passive listener is fine.

More resources​