Tag Archives: scan

Hostcheck

I continue to publish some my coding.

Hostcheck is a simple Perl script that can be useful to quickly check if a list of host is up.
It just read a host file and check if the host are available doing a ping test or trying to open a socket.

Nothing great, but it may help to quickly check that most of things are right after a network change, for instance.
Because we want to test many hosts, and not to scan, the pace is fast so it may not be 100% reliable. The idea is to see roughly is the connectivity is correct or if your whole LAN is down.
It uses colors and is easy to read, so it might be good to show to your manager ! :)

I hope it will be useful. More info and download link are there.

SinFP, part II : comparison with Nmap 4.20

Here is the update of my previous test of SinFP.

I compared then the output of SinFP and Nmap on different machines, and found out that SinFP made a slightly better job than Nmap in OS detection, though it is not the primary goal of Nmap whereas it is the one of SinFP.

However, I made a mistake that the author of SinFP made me aware of.

I conducted the tests of Nmap using the package of my distribution, thinking it was the latest one.

Actually, it was only the version 4.10. Moreover, the current version, 4.20, brought up a new OS detection engine.

Therefore, a new test with version 4.20 was absolutely needed.

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SinFP, part I : introduction and comparison with Nmap 4.10

Last week, I found out a very interesting program, SinFP (those who are french and read the Misc magazine must already know ;) ).

Its goal is to help you detecting what operating system a remote machine is running.
Well, you will tell me that we already have many programs that does this job, starting from the so famous nmap… but the approach is quite different this time.

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