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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Use Angry IP Scanner to find hosts by open ports

Takeaway: Finding systems on a network can be a challenge, especially if critical services like DNS are not available. In this post tell you how the Angry IP Scanner can help you find systems on a network.

Don’t let the name fool you, it doesn’t make you angry. The Angry IP Scanner can actually make you happy! I was recently in search of a way to scan a network for a host that wasn’t running Windows, so I couldn’t use my trusty nbtscan tool.

The basic premise is that I know what ports would be open on a specified host, but I don’t have DNS to find the system. Instead of seeing what systems are online and simply attempting to log into them, the Angry IP Scanner tool can let me scan an IP range and also report if specific ports are open. In my situation, I was looking for an ESXi host on a particular network; and I knew that ports 443 and 902 will be listening on that system.

I tried using all of my normal tools and found that the Angry IP Scanner would be the tool to get this task done. The Angry IP Scanner has a parameter for the scan to list if the results will display one or more ports. This was perfect for what I was looking for.

In the lab network I scanned, I had two ESXi hosts that would be running the selected ports (443 and 902). The scan was completed rather quickly, and the results quickly display any resolvable host name as well as the hosts that don’t have a ping reply (those in red) as shown in Figure A below:

Figure A

Figure A
The Angry IP Scanner is a rather easy tool to use. Further, it is a standalone tool that doesn’t require an installation. I used the Windows version, but there are also Linux and Mac OS editions of the tool.
The Angry IP Scanner is a free title and can be downloaded from AngryIP.org.

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