Re: Call for testers: Nping 0.1BETA1 Released.

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 11:11:40AM +0100, Luis M. wrote:
> Yes, when Nping is run by a user without root privileges, the default
> is to attempt TCP connections using the traditional connect() system
> call.  Other ping utilities choose ICMP Echo by default because they are
> installed setuid root, so regular users can still access the raw socket
> interface and send ICMP packets.
>
> I choose port 80 because  although not all machines have it open, a lot
> of them do. However, that's only the default behavior, you can choose
> any port you want supplying "-p N" where N is a port number or even a
> port range (e.g: "-p 443"  pings port 443 and "-p 1-1024" pings the
> first 1024 ports). 

In our ping probe effectiveness research we found that if you don't have
a priori knowledge of a host, the best single non-root probes are SYN to
port 443 or 80, with 443 being slightly better. These are not bad
probes, finding about 40% of hosts that respond to any kind of probe.
ICMP echo is the only thing better; it gets about 60%.

http://www.bamsoftware.com/wiki/Nmap/EffectivenessOfPingProbes#a-20090525

David Fifield

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