You can play pink panther’s music on the back to get the feel of it.

Well, I don’t remember how I had stumbled upon it, but for some reason, I wanted to know who else was online from my hostel. Because, I’m kinda alone here, on campus in the vacations, and the hostel’s really big and blah blah. *girl cry*

Anyway, so, I came across this beautiful command called nmap.

Now, while it can be used to provide you with hundred kinds of information about your network, I’m gonna just teach you to stalk here. Because, that’s what real men do.

Okay, to the real thing now.
It’s really neat. I’m assuming you know your IP Address (if you don’t just type ifconfig eth0 and look for inet address)

Like, for me, it says : 10.4.1.13. Now, it’s simple as this. In the same terminal window, write the following and hit enter:

nmap 10.4.1.*

This will basically scan all the IP addresses from 10.4.1.0 to 10.4.1.255 and check which (hosts) ones are up (runnning) and which are down. Moreover, it’ll also tell you which ports are open on which IP.
Cool, right?

Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is an open source tool for network exploration and security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts.

But, there’s more. You can do it within some range too! Say, you want to just scan who’s up and using the internet in the range of first 20 IPs on your local network.
Then, I can just write:

nmap 10.4.1.0-19

Then, this was just one use of nmap. You can discover a hundred more. Or at least some useful nasty ones are mentioned here : http://www.cyberciti.biz/networking/nmap-command-examples-tutorials/

I’m not so much into networking, as of now. So, That’s it for today. Do share the post if you found it useful. And let me know in the comments below if this helped you out, or if you got stuck anywhere, or have any kind of question. And, most importantly, keep stalking.