Nmap Hackers: RE: Examples of legit nmap usage?

[Rob Shein <Rshein () LANSOLUTIONS com>]

How about the fact that it's good to know what hackers use, and what it will
look like from a networking standpoint, combined with the fact that almost
all good hackers use nmap?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Foust, Adam G. [mailto:agfoust () tva gov]
> Sent: Friday, September 17, 1999 8:57 AM
> To: nmap-hackers () insecure org
> Subject: Examples of legit nmap usage?
>
>
> nmap has the potential of becoming an extremely useful tool 
> for me in my job
> (not in the hacker sense, but in the discovery and security 
> sense). I ran it
> for a while and built up a picture of our intranet WAN (with 
> the help of a
> custom bit of perl and CGI programming), but now I'm being 
> told knock it off
> for good based on the high amount of messages that began to 
> accumulate in
> our router logs. All of our other $$$ commercial network 
> tools have so far
> provided a rather piecemeal view of things, and I would like 
> to continue to
> use this excellent nmap tool to augment our picture of things 
> (particularly
> having an inventory of TCP services).
>
> Can anyone help me out with a good "business case" for 
> administratively
> running nmap in a corporate environment? What would be the 
> impact to routers
> and hosts of say automating a weekly scan on a rather large 
> network (I won't
> give specifics, but I will say that if I seed nmap with a 
> list of ping-able
> IP addresses it requires a couple of days to complete a 
> single sweep)? Is
> using nmap in this fashion a dumb idea?
>
> Any good examples of nmap being used for network discovery in any
> corporations out there?
>
> Any information you can provide would be of great use. Thanks.