Scanning IPv6 addresses

Although we haven't exhausted all if the IPv4 addresses as some people predicted, IPv6 addresses are becoming more common, and the Nmap development team has been working hard on improving its IPv6 support. All of the port scanning and host discovery techniques have been implemented already, and this makes Nmap essential when working with IPv6 networks.

This recipe describes how to scan an IPv6 address with Nmap.

How to do it...

Let's scan the IPv6 address representing the localhost (::1):

# nmap -6 ::1

The results look like a regular Nmap scan:

Nmap scan report for ip6-localhost (::1) 
Host is up (0.000018s latency). 
Not shown: 996 closed ports 
PORT     STATE SERVICE VERSION 
25/tcp   open  smtp    Exim smtpd 
80/tcp   open  http    Apache httpd 2.2.16 ((Debian)) 
631/tcp  open  ipp     CUPS 1.4 
8080/tcp open  http    Apache Tomcat/Coyote JSP engine 1.1 

How it works...

The argument -6 tells Nmap to perform IPv6 scanning. You can basically set any other flag in combination...