pnscan: A parallel network scanner

Back to network tools for a bit. We entertained two parallelized compression tools; here’s one that claims to be a parallel network scanner.

pnscan admits it’s not the tool nmap is, but for what little I’ve seen, it does a pretty good job. As you can see above, it did find the only other machine on my network, and the ssh port that’s open there.

As you can see in the help flags, it can also filter out results that don’t match a string, and also send specific information to specific points. The README file has some good examples too.

Networking is still my weakest point though, so while I can see that it works and I have a vague idea of what it’s doing, I can’t imagine how I would use it.

More distressing though, is that I can’t really be sure it’s “parallelized,” mostly because all my tests finished way too fast to check.

On the plus side though, pnscan didn’t seem to care if I was a privileged user or not; it did everything I asked without calling out sudo to check my credentials. Maybe that’s on the minus side, depending on your perspective. 🙄

I’m willing to keep pnscan in mind if I need a fundamental network tool that doesn’t need superuser powers and seems fairly potent.

pnscan is in Debian; I didn’t see it in Arch/AUR. If you decide to try it and you need to compile it yourself, just make crashed for me. make lnx did the trick though. 😉