I had an older version of the toolset that would always run very reliably for MAC address discovery. It was version 8.1 I think and was installed on an XP client computer. I would take the laptop into a building and turn all computers on then run a discovery. It always worked reliably and gave results I expected.
Now, I have version 10.0.0.237 of the Mac address discovery tool and have tried to do this using a Vista client (Dell E6500 to be exact) but the results are not reliable and always different. The first time I ran it, 66 results. Second time, I performed a ping sweep and it returned 186 results but no reverse dns (I needed the names from the discovery). I then cleared arp cache and dns cache on the client (arp -d * and ipconfig /flushdns) and it ran forever returning a whopping 38 results.
I toyed around in the options and increased the timeout, # of pings, etc. This had no effect from what I could tell.
Why the inconsistency? Any suggestions other than performing a ping sweep first and then running a discovery?
