ip neigh gives no response on a VM

Question

I'm running Ubuntu on VMWare Workstation Pro. And I'm trying to run the command ip neigh on the terminal and I don't get any response, it just skips over.

What could be the problem?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments, if you set your virtual network interface to bridge, the virtualized host will be as all the other hosts in your LAN. It will ask for an IP to your DHCP built in on your ISP router (on an ordinary case).

The ip neigh command (or ip neighbor) is part of the iproute2 package, which is used to manage network interfaces and routing. It displays the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) cache of the local machine, showing IP addresses and their corresponding MAC addresses for devices that the system has recently communicated with. The entries in this cache can have various states, such as REACHABLE, STALE, or FAILED, indicating the status of connectivity with those devices.

If you didn't access to other devices, even in bridge mode ip n won't return anything. Try to change that by running before nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24 or fping -a -g 192.168.1.0/24. Of course, you should change the subnet to the one on your LAN. This will try to access to each host on the subnet, updating the ARP cache.

To see other hosts using NAT mode you should set up at those hosts on the same subnet.