Linux Server Security

Chapter 5Nping

Just as the U.S. military's DARPA (the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contributed so greatly and helped to shape the Internet that you know and love today, a similar military-to-civilian transition also resulted in the most common network-discovery tool used on the Internet today: the ping command. The ping command's ancestry stems from naval vessels sending sonar pings to detect if other vessels or geophysical features were in the vicinity.

As part of the network discovery functionality that the powerful security tool Nmap (https://nmap.org) provides, it also includes access to a powerful improvement to the standard ping command, called Nping (https://nmap.org/nping/). If you have used Nmap, then you'll know that you're in safe hands with any tool created by the Nmap Project in terms of reliability and well-considered functionality.

Let's look at how the Nping tool can help you gain more insight into what your systems and networks are doing, digging into both remote and local connections.

Functionality

On the surface, you might expect Nping's functionality to be relatively limited. After all, when you fire off a ping, you send a question and then simply wait for an answer. Although Nping is still not a finished piece of software, it's safe to say that it's a highly comprehensive and sophisticated networking tool.

You will begin by getting used to the syntax. You'll need to be logged in as root, the superuser, to execute some ...