Scan ports on an IP address?

[Joseph Anthony]

How do you do it? I am pretty sure there is some sort of software that will enable you to do this, because you can't with Telnet or the DOS prompt.

[cilpolir]

google is your friend, thats all I have to say

[sanddbox]

google is your friend, thats all I have to say

I'll be blunt here - I have a feeling that when you don't know the answer to a question, you just tell people to google.

Every computer is running a service behind each of its ports. In order to determine if a port is open, you simply have to send a message to that port and analyze the response.

If you are looking for port scanning tools, nmap is the most popular.

[Goatboy]

... you can't with Telnet or the DOS prompt.

Actually, you can do some rudimentary scanning with Telnet. Basically you might send something like:

Code: Select all

GET / HTTP/1.1


to port 80 and analyze the response. It's not fast or efficient, but it gets the job done if you're scrapped for resources.

[Calian]

nMap as mentioned is the most popular, depending on what your looking for in a Port scan, learn to use the various extensions aswell.

If your jsut looking for something simple and easy to use, AngryIP Scanner, will get the job done and you can choose to add in the nessecary basic ports.

An if you want fast - scanrand.

Have fun

C

[cilpolir]

complete off topic, but I need a chance to defend myself against the accusation of sanddbox

google is your friend, thats all I have to say

I'll be blunt here - I have a feeling that when you don't know the answer to a question, you just tell people to google.

That is not true at all. I do know the answer to the question(also to the other topic), just was in a rush (late for school). So I just typed that to encourage him to do his own research before asking.Also i see now that i forget to add the second half of the sentence: It was supposed to be: google is your friend, that's all I have to say for now." After school I was planning to answer it more in HTS style, but you guys beat me to it. That's all there is to it.
EDIT: just seeing i've been here for over a year now, thought you would think more of me after that time.
Guess you don't....

[tremor77]

There are many built in tools to the command prompt and BASH that can easily accomplish the port scanning of an IP address if you were to script it out. But a good tool is useful to cover the 65536 available ports to scan along with the various scans available: TCP, SYN, UDP, ACK and more. Remember when scanning an IP address that you may not be scanning an individual computer but, may be scanning a router, a camera, a network device of any kind. Some systems have port scanning blockers built in.. especially routers. Over scanning over a specific period of time may get result in an IP block from many devices. An individual computer running decent firewall software would also do this.

If you are looking not just for ports but for ports and vulnerability you want a "vulnerability scanner". Most of the good tools for that that I know of A- cost money and B- generally require administrative access to the network you are scanning (so that I cannot be used unethically).

If you want to play around.. this is a skiddie favorite: http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/superscan4.htm do to being free and generally easy to use.

[centip3de]

google is your friend, thats all I have to say

I'll be blunt here - I have a feeling that when you don't know the answer to a question, you just tell people to google.

But...When you don't know the answer to questions....isn't that what you do o_O

[sanddbox]

google is your friend, thats all I have to say

I'll be blunt here - I have a feeling that when you don't know the answer to a question, you just tell people to google.

But...When you don't know the answer to questions....isn't that what you do o_O

Nope. I'll tell people to Google if a) they're asking a REALLY obvious question (like this one), and b) I'm not in the mood to answer a question easily found on google. My problem with cilpolir was that the majority of his posts consisted of "google it lol".

[Dwere]

AngryIP Scanner is what my friend and I used to scan each other's ip addresses a couple years ago. You used to be able to google "Ip Scanner" and like the second or 3rd result was a direct download to it. I thought it was a virus at first becuase clicking it immediately wanted me to download something but my friend downloaded it first, and it turned out to be what we were looking for.
It's really simple and easy to use, you can tell it to scan all ports, or select certain ones, or a certain range, etc. You can also scan one specific ip or a range of them. If I remember right.
I tried messing around with nMap, but I either failed at it, had a crappy version of it, or it is just far more confusing to use than AngryIp.
Good luck.