Sometimes we need to check to see if an IP Address is being used. Maybe we're looking to see if its available and working, or perhaps we trying to find a spare one, regardless the process is the same. 

Firstly open Terminal. This can be found in the launcher as "Terminal". A window will be opened with a command prompt. 

At this prompt type "ping" followed by a space and the IP Address we've requested. For example:

ping 192.168.1.100

and you will either receive a response like this:

or this:

The first one indicates that there is no response from 192.168.1.100, and the second indicates that there is a response from 192.168.104.42. Please Report this back to the HelpDesk as requested. 

Using this simple process we can quickly identify if an IP Address is being used or not. It isn't foolproof and in rare cases a device might be on the network, but not responding to pings however this is quite rare.