Nmap 6 released after three years of work

I used nmap a lot during the 2.5 days (c. 2001), and was even a (very occasional) contributor as they were porting to Windows. I can safely say I have 0 idea how 90% of its functionality works anymore - and I think that's a testament to how far the project has come.<p>It was best of breed then, and is up there with the most successful open source projects - certainly in the security space, but maybe even anywhere.<p>Hats off to Fyodor and the rest of the team. This looks like really excellent work.

Whenever you buy a new network connected gizmo please scan it with nmap and please submit the OS/Service fingerprints if nmap does not know about the device. NMAP makes it super easy to contribute the the fingerprints db.

Everyone has seen Nmap used and might not even know it. It was famously used by Trinity in The Matrix, and has popped up in Die Hard, Bourne Ultimatum, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and more. <a href="http://nmap.org/movies.html" rel="nofollow">http://nmap.org/movies.html</a><p>I wonder if Hollywood will upgrade.

Interestingly, this T-Mobile prepaid sim I'm on blocks me from nmap.org

I can't believe it's been 3 years since they released v5. Truly one of the better open source security scanners out there. Thanks for sharing.

#nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 might be the most commonly used line of nmap. But it works best on V5.0 and not V5.x+

Maybe I don't use Nmap enough, but I find the Nmap switches very difficult to remember. It usually takes a few minutes in the man pages, then a few more minutes in Google before I finally figure out how to do what I want. Perhaps this goes away with experience?

Great to see the large list of new features and improvements.<p>Get a copy and start scanning, don't just scan your web servers and Internet gateway. Have a crack at your Internet connected TV, WII and any other device that has an IP Address. If nothing else its fun. :)

From the release notes: "Gopher over IPv6!"<p>I'm really tempted to set up a gopher server on an IPv6-only host, just to try this out. While perhaps pointless, it's a testament to open source that NMAP includes this.

The link in the main document to the performance page: <a href="http://nmap.org/6/changes-performance" rel="nofollow">http://nmap.org/6/changes-performance</a> leads to a 404 :(

Besides Nmap's innate usefulness, it is part of the backbone of many other tools. How long before BackTrack upgrades? Tools like Metasploit, do they include their own Nmap (which would need to be upgraded), or relay on your having it?

Can I use nmap to detect who is talking to who on a network &#38; over what ports? I dont want to install agent script on each node, but would install nmap on one of the nodes in the network.

Look forward to upgrading my 5.21. Congrats on a new major release.