During my years of IT life, I’ve traced countless cables in the back of the server room racks, trying to find out which switch port is the destiny of the other end of that cable. And I never thought I could use a piece of software to do the work for me. Very stupid of me.
LDWin, short for Link Discovery Client for Windows, is an open-source network utility that lets you discover where a network cable goes without having to go through the hassle I’ve been through. This can be very helpful in the workplace when diagnosing suspected network connectivity issues.
It’s a GUI-based portable Windows tool that you can just download and launch. Select the network adapter from the Network Connection dropdown and click Get Link Data.
The tool will then listen on the selected network adaptor for link protocol announcements. It may take up to 60 seconds to receive an announcement. Once received, the received information will be displayed in the results section, like screenshot above.
You can use the Save Link Data button to save the information if you like.
LDWin supports the following methods of link discovery:
I should also mention that LDWin works even in a virtual environment. If you are using it on a virtual machine, it will discover the which network port the host is connected to. Pretty neat.
No Link data found
in my network that has 20 connections. 6 computers 2 routers (2ed as extender) switch, 2 NAS, 9 Ipcams, printer.
It needs to be wired connection. Wifi won’t work. After all, it’s to determine which network port is being used anyway.
the 6 computers and 2 NAS and 2ed router are all wired
now June 8, still no reply. I’m going to bet there is some service, not normally running in Windows 10 Pro that needs to be started, and the program does not report this.
It works flawlessly in my network but every network is different so it could be the configuration on your switch that blocks the protocols used in the tool. Maybe submit a ticket or question to the author on its Github page?