Nmap and Interview

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 12:56:17 +0000

I was just about to write a quick post regarding Nmap’s new 3.93 release when I noticed on Slashdot that WhiteDust had an interview with Nmap creator and all-round interesting person, Fyodor. It’s actually a good read, so definitely give it a look.

What is Nmap? Well, it’s many things, but generally, it’s a port scanner. It’ll scan a subnet(or nets), assess each IP address, and try to tell you which ports are open, what they do, and what the device and it’s OS are. Very useful if you’re looking for ‘interesting’ (i.e. unauthorized) devices on your network.

The reason I was going to note 3.93 is that on my XP box, for the first time since XP2, it worked completely 100% correctly. That may also be because WinPcap which Nmap uses (and others like Ethereal) has moved it’s version 3.1 release out of beta. Either way, it’s good to have it back to it’s reliable best. I should say that Nmap usualy works anywhere, but my XP builds just seemed to have issues!

Of course, you can get around this problem as I did by having either a Linux box (or Mac OS X) available, or make use of of a liveCD edition of Linux such as Knoppix.

Nmap on Nanikore

Nmap and Interview