Monitoring a network using Nmap

For any network that is either big or small, network monitoring and security is a very essential task. Regular monitoring of the network is important to protect systems from attacks and also to keep viruses and malware out of a network.

Nmap, short for network mapper, is a free and open source tool that monitors a network, and it is the most versatile tool used by system/network administrators. Nmap can be used to perform security scans, explore a network, find open ports on remote systems, and perform network audits.

Getting ready

To show how Nmap works, we need a minimum of two systems to form a small network. On one system, we will install the nmap package, while the other system will be used as a host to scan.

How to do it…

In this section, we will take a look at how to use Nmap to perform different types of scans.

1. The first step will be to install the nmap package if it is not installed already. To do so, we use this command:

   apt-get install nmap
   

   We get the...