How-To

A collection of small-to-medium articles on tips, best practices and advices on overlook fing

How to be guided through options

Run the application as

fing --interactive

The interactive mode is a special feature developed to make you able to skip reading a long usage manual and immediately start finging: as fing is a command-line tool you would need to provide a long list of arguments to specify your settings. If you start the interactive mode the tool itself will guide through the available features and configurations, letting you able to start complex discoveries in few seconds. The feature not only configures fing and start your discovery, but also shows you the resulting command line arguments, according to your chosen options. On Windows you can start interactive mode from fing shortcut in Start menu / Applications. The other way to start the interactive mode is by running the command below.


 

How to start fing at machine boot on Windows

Fing network discoveries can be installed as Windows services: if you integrated fing in your daily work, making it perform network discoveries in background, generating reports of sheet files for you, and you are on Windows, you can start thinking about installing it as a Windows service. When running as Windows service, fing automatically starts when you power on your computer, and automatically stops when you shutdown it; and of course fing services can be controlled from Windows Service control panel as any other service.

Installing fing as a service is very easy: take your original command line previously used and add the service registration command: --registerservice ServiceName. You must use absolute paths for every file you provide in the command line (both output files and session file). Please note also that by default fing service will run as LocalSystem user, so if you configured or customized fing configuration in property configuration files, you should make sure to copy those custom configurations to that user too. E.g. to install as a service the example above, provided to show a demo of discovery sessions, you could:

fing -n 192.168.1.0/24 -o table,html,c:\report\lan.html --session c:\report\lansess --installservice FingService

Related fing network discovery is installed as service and immediately started. If you want to later uninstall the registered fing service, you could simply:

fing --uninstallservice FingService

Please note that at the moment fing service removal is not supported when completely uninstalling fing. So if you are in the process of upgrading or removing fing software from your computer, you should stop and uninstall running fing services before.