What is NMAP?

Network Mapper is known as Nmap.

Nmap free and open source (license) utility for

• Network discovery
• Security auditing
• Network inventory
• Managing service upgrade schedules
• Monitoring host or service uptime

Nmap run on all Operating System and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine

• what hosts are available on the network
• what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering
• what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running
• what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use

Nmap was named “Security Product of the Year” by Linux Journal, Info World, LinuxQuestions.Org, and Codetalker Digest.

Nmap Features:

Flexible: Supports techniques for mapping with IP filters, firewalls, routers, and other obstacles. This includes many port scanning mechanisms (both TCP & UDP), OS detection, version detection, ping sweeps.

Powerful: scan huge networks of literally hundreds of thousands of machines.

Portable: Most operating systems are supported, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, IRIX, Mac OS X, HP-UX, NetBSD, Sun OS, Amiga, and more.

Easy: While Nmap offers a rich set of advanced features for power users, you can start out as simply as "nmap -v -A targethost". 

Free: The primary goals of the Nmap Project is to help make the Internet a little more secure and to provide administrators/auditors/hackers with an advanced tool for exploring their networks. Nmap is available for free download, and also comes with full source code that you may modify and redistribute under the terms of the license.

Well Documented: Significant effort has been put into comprehensive and up-to-date man pages, whitepapers, tutorials.

Supported: While Nmap comes with no warranty, it is well supported by a vibrant community of developers and users.

Acclaimed: Nmap has won numerous awards, including "Information Security Product of the Year" by Linux Journal, Info World and Codetalker Digest.

Popular: Thousands of people download Nmap every day, and it is included with many operating systems (Redhat Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc). It is among the top ten (out of 30,000) programs at the Freshmeat.Net repository.