Skip to content
Scanopy Scanopy

Limitations

Scanopy is designed for discovering and visualizing local network infrastructure. This page documents known limitations and boundaries.

Network Scanning

Section titled “Network Scanning”

IPv6

Section titled “IPv6”

Scanopy currently supports IPv4 only.

Planned:

  • Collecting and displaying IPv6 addresses during discovery
  • Manual entry of IPv6 addresses when editing hosts

Not planned:

  • Full IPv6 subnet scanning (a /64 contains 18 quintillion addresses)

Large Subnets

Section titled “Large Subnets”

Trying to scan a /8? That’s 16 million IPs. Scanopy automatically skips subnets larger than /10 to prevent accidental mega-scans.

If you need to scan a large network, break it into smaller subnets and scan them individually.

Layer 2 vs Layer 3

Section titled “Layer 2 vs Layer 3”

For subnets the daemon is directly connected to:

  • MAC addresses are collected via ARP
  • All responsive hosts are discovered

For remote subnets (routed through a gateway):

  • No MAC addresses (ARP doesn’t cross routers)
  • Only hosts with open ports are discovered
  • Some hosts may not respond to remote probes

For best results, deploy a daemon on each network segment. See Multi-VLAN Deployment.

Service Detection

Section titled “Service Detection”

Pattern-Based Detection

Section titled “Pattern-Based Detection”

Scanopy detects services by matching against known patterns (ports, HTTP endpoints, headers). This means:

  • Services on non-standard ports may not be detected
  • Services must respond to HTTP probes to match endpoint patterns
  • Custom or obscure services won’t be detected automatically

See Service Detection for how detection works and how to improve it.

What Can’t Be Detected

Section titled “What Can’t Be Detected”
  • Services that don’t listen on network ports
  • Services behind authentication that block probing
  • Internal application components (microservices behind a gateway)
  • Cloud/SaaS services (Scanopy scans your network, not the internet)

Platform-Specific

Section titled “Platform-Specific”

Docker on macOS/Windows

Section titled “Docker on macOS/Windows”

Docker Desktop on macOS and Windows doesn’t support host networking — the container can’t see your actual network. Use the standalone binary instead.

Windows ARP Discovery

Section titled “Windows ARP Discovery”

Windows requires Npcap for ARP-based host discovery. Without it, the daemon falls back to port scanning only (slower, less reliable for hosts without open ports).

Requesting Features

Section titled “Requesting Features”

If a limitation affects your use case: