It’s long been a feature in the VENM console. When you scan your network, the scanner would send a broadcast packet to obtain the MAC address of the detected computers on your LAN. The key concept in that sentence is “broadcast packet”.
Most of our customers are Network Administrators or Engineers so I probably don’t need to bore you with the reasons that using broadcast packets just does not work over a WAN connection such as VPN. If you’ve scanned over a VPN, you’re probably aware that the VENM console just fills the MAC address field with a bunch of 0’s.
We’ve been writing code into the latest scanning engine that will use other methods to attempt to detect the MAC address if the broadcast packet fails over a WAN or VPN. Right now, we have it working in the ‘Computer Properties’ window and we’re working to get it working in the scan.
The catch is that you need to have Administrative rights on the remote computers and the port required must not be blocked. This is typically TCP port 135.
This is just one of the many things that we’re working on for your next release.