I got to play with nmap today. A machine I use as a backup repository was missing. Silly me – I couldn’t remember the IP address of the machine. Due to the following facts…
1. backup PC is headless
2. backup PC is in the garage, and,
3. I am lazy
…I decided to use nmap to determine the IP address of the missing machine (as opposed to walking 20 metres).
>nmap -sP 10.10.0.0/24
- nmap: the nmap executable
- -sP: scan type of ping
- 10.10.0.0/24: scan IP addresses in range from 10.10.0.0 to 10.10.0.255
It found all my machines (and identified them correctly when I changed the command to >nmap -sS -O 10.10.0.0/24 )
Nmap even managed to find my DMZ when I loosened up the network from /24 to /16. I’d forgotten about my DMZ as I hardly have any use for it any more.
I was thoroughly impressed at the power of nmap, and kind of scared at the level of detail it could pull from the PC’s scattered around my network.
Network Diagram:
