Re: Service name capitalization in Nmap?

["DePriest, Jason R." <jrdepriest () gmail com>]

The idea of keeping the lower-cased notation for nmap output and
places where nmap output is directly referenced while using the proper
upper-cased notation when speaking about a protocol in general sounds
good to me.

Nmap calls a port that seems to be listening with an SSH server 'ssh'

When nmap finds something that looks like a secure HTTP server, it
sticks an 'ssl' in there because it might not be HTTPS.

I like to think of what nmap displays as a best guess and therefore
not tied to syntactic rules of upper / lower.

In the same vein, I don't see why 'domain' needs to be changed to
'dns'.  That really depends on why you chose to have 'domain' there in
the first place.  Does that reason no longer exist?

-Jason

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Fyodor <> wrote:
> In my upcoming Nmap book, I've been rather torn about how to
> capitalize various service names.  On the one hand, acronyms such as
> DNS, SMTP, and VoIP arguably look better when "properly" capitalized.
> On the other hand, Nmap uses so many service names that the approach
> leads to lots of capitalization all over the page.  In addition, they
> are always lowercase in Nmap output (at least in the port table).  And
> readers often get confused/annoyed when I use lowercase when quoting
> Nmap directly, but then capitalize a term differently in the next
> sentence.
>
> I was thinking of using this as an excuse to keep them all lowercase
> in the book.  But maybe I should just capitalize them in Nmap instead.
> Which of these port tables do you like better?
>
> [Current scan of scanme.nmap.org]
> PORT    STATE  SERVICE VERSION
> 22/tcp  open   ssh     OpenSSH 4.3 (protocol 2.0)
> 25/tcp  closed smtp
> 53/tcp  open   domain  ISC BIND 9.3.4
> 70/tcp  closed gopher
> 80/tcp  open   http    Apache httpd 2.2.2 ((Fedora))
> 113/tcp closed auth
>
> [scan of same, but capitalize acronyms]
> PORT    STATE  SERVICE VERSION
> 22/tcp  open   SSH     OpenSSH 4.3 (protocol 2.0)
> 25/tcp  closed SMTP
> 53/tcp  open   domain  ISC BIND 9.3.4
> 70/tcp  closed gopher
> 80/tcp  open   HTTP    Apache httpd 2.2.2 ((Fedora))
> 113/tcp closed auth
>
> Cheers,
> -F
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
> http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
> Archived at http://SecLists.Org



-- 
NOTICE: Reading this email message requires root privileges which you
do not appear to possess. Sorry, dude.

_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://SecLists.Org