How to use nmap to scan your network

As part of your cloud migration journey, it is important to have all the tools at your disposal. To facilitate the discovery process, you can use Nmap in addition to the other discovery methods.

With Nmap’s powerful capabilities and good documentation, you can identify all the hosts you have running on your network, open ports, and running services. It is possible to discover those places which are often hard to reach.

Nmap is capable of producing its output in an XML file. It allows you to inspect the raw scan output before sending it to the Tidal API with Tidal Tools. Once uploaded to the Tidal Platform, you will be able to visualize your network devices, track your complete server inventory, and build on this data with other discovery methods. This is how you can make informed decisions on your cloud migration path.

Using Nmap with Tidal Tools

By leveraging the power of Tidal Tools, you can send the output generated by Nmap to your Tidal account.

  1. Install Tidal Tools
  2. Connect Tidal Tools and your Tidal account with tidal login.

  3. Run Nmap with the flags of your choosing and save the output to an XML file. For example,

     nmap -sV -p80,443,8080,8443,1433,1521,27017 <ip-address/range> -oX my-network.xml

    Note: the -sV flag will attempt to determine the version of the service running on port and the -oX specifies the output as an XML file. Want more scanning options?

  4. Run this Tidal Tools command to upload your previously generated Nmap output to your Tidal account 
     tidal sync nmap my-network.xml
  5. Head over to your Tidal account! (https://[your workspace].tidal.cloud/host-discovery)

Installing Nmap

Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime.

You can find all the documentation and instructions on how to download Nmap to your environment on the official site.

Nmap usage

Currently, Tidal supports the collection of Hosts (IP addresses), PTR records, their open ports, the ports status, the port protocol (TCP/UDP), and the services running in the port, including the version.

Nmap offers a wide range of utilities and commands, such as Port scanning, Host discovery, Service and version detection to name a few. Here are some basic examples for how to do some nmap scanning.

Target Specification

nmap 192.168.1.1-254                # Scan a range

Scan Techniques

nmap 192.168.1.1 -sS                # TCP SYN port scan (Default)
 
nmap 192.168.1.1 -sT                # TCP connect port scan (Default without root privilege)
 
nmap 192.168.1.1 -sU                # UDP port scan

Host Discovery

nmap 192.168.1.1-3 -sL              # No Scan. List targets only
 
nmap 192.168.1.1/24 -sn             # Disable port scanning. Host discovery only.
 
nmap 192.168.1.1-5 -Pn              # Disable host discovery. Port scan only.