Running NMAP on Intel Macs

Before I switched to an Intel based Mac I had always used NMapFE as my nmap front end. Since I only need to run nmap on my G4 MacMini at home and my G5 PowerMac at work I didn’t notice until today that NMapFE doesn’t work in Intel Macs. I had recommended NMapFE to Allison of the NosillaCast and she replied to tell me it didn’t work for her. I tried it on my own MacBookPro and sure enough, it doesn’t work. So, I went hunting for a good nmap GUI for Intel Macs and eventually came up with a good solution. The bad news is that this solution involves installing three things separately. But, don’t worry, all three are small and painlessly simple to install.

[tags]nmap, security, Mac, OS X[/tags]

The first thing you have to install is the nmap command-line tool. You have a couple of options here including building from source or getting from Fink but IMO the simplest thing to do is to download the universal binary package from here and install it. This will install version 4.11 of nmap to /usr/local/bin/.

At this stage you have a fully working command-line version of nmap but no GUI. XNmap is a nice free GUI which allows you to specify which nmap binary to use so it can work with any nmap you choose to install. Once you have that installed you can do many types of scan but not all. XNmap doesn’t run with admin privileges like NMapFE does so you can’t run all types of scan from it. To get around this problem I wrote a very simple little application called XNmap Launcher which lets you easily launch XNmap with full administrator privileges so all scan types can be used. You can get this little app from the downloads page on my website or from here.