Is there such a thing as open source or freeware network discovery software that works?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Joe Somebody
  • Start date Start date
J

Joe Somebody

Greetings all,

I have been searching all over the internet looking for a network
discovery tool for IP networks that works by querying a local SNMP
enabled router for a route table list, then uses that route table as a
basis for network discovery of nodes on each network route it finds.

Commerical tools like Net Sonar in the Solarwinds toolset is a good
example. Unfortunately you cant get it without buying a whole toolset
that is quite spendy.

Other commercial examples are HP Openview, a complete SNMP management
system, Castlerock SNMPc, Whats up Gold by Ipswitch, etc.

Again, who needs an entire toolset for just a good discovery feature.

Simple "enter your range" or "enter your subnet" type freeware
discovery tools are very slow in medium to large sized networks.

Please let me know if there is such an animal, like the commercial
discovery tools available in open source or freeware. Whether it runs
on Windows, Linux, or Mac doesnt matter to me.

Port scanning is not important to me either, this is an internal LAN
and Im not doing a security audit.

OS Fingerprinting however would be useful so that it attempts to guess
the OS like NMAP does. But that is secondary as well.


Thanks.
 
Joe said:
Greetings all,

I have been searching all over the internet looking for a network
discovery tool for IP networks that works by querying a local SNMP
enabled router for a route table list, then uses that route table as a
basis for network discovery of nodes on each network route it finds.

Commerical tools like Net Sonar in the Solarwinds toolset is a good
example. Unfortunately you cant get it without buying a whole toolset
that is quite spendy.

Other commercial examples are HP Openview, a complete SNMP management
system, Castlerock SNMPc, Whats up Gold by Ipswitch, etc.

Again, who needs an entire toolset for just a good discovery feature.

Simple "enter your range" or "enter your subnet" type freeware
discovery tools are very slow in medium to large sized networks.

Please let me know if there is such an animal, like the commercial
discovery tools available in open source or freeware. Whether it runs
on Windows, Linux, or Mac doesnt matter to me.

Port scanning is not important to me either, this is an internal LAN
and Im not doing a security audit.

OS Fingerprinting however would be useful so that it attempts to guess
the OS like NMAP does. But that is secondary as well.


Thanks.
Click to expand...
Will this do?

SIDEN is a distributed network discovery tool used for intrusion detection
research. The current SIDEN architecture allows you to simulate
coordinated/distributed network probes by a group of attackers. Using it,
you can simulate such probes against one target or many targets. The point
of this is to generate the traffic caused by distributed network probes, so
that it can be analyzed for better understanding of distributed network
probes. This will hopefully help us to improve how Intrusion Detection
Systems are written.
GNU General Public License (GPL)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/siden/
http://freshmeat.net/redir/siden/9520/url_tgz/siden-0.1.0.tar.gz

--

Some You Won't Find Anywhere Else...

http://www.sover.net/~wysiwygx/index.html
. --- . . - - - - - - - - - - - -
/ SOS \ __ / Freeware - - - - - -
/ / \ ( ) / - - - - -
/ / / / / / / \/ \ - - - -
/ / / / / / / : : - - -
/ / / / / ' ' - -
/ / //..\\
=====UU==UU=====
'///||\\\'
' '' '
 
Joe Somebody wrote:
Will this do?

SIDEN is a distributed network discovery tool used for intrusion detection
research.
Click to expand...

I don't think so - that's a cyberattack simulation tool. Doesn't do
what the OP wants. He wants something that maps a network - discovers
all the hosts, IP addresses, etc.
 
I have been searching all over the internet looking for a network
discovery tool for IP networks that works by querying a local SNMP
enabled router for a route table list, then uses that route table as a
basis for network discovery of nodes on each network route it finds.
Click to expand...

If you've got ten machines or less (for the freeware version) or are
willing to pay $200 for 100 nodes (plus $100 for each additional 100)
for the non-free version, I found something called Newt which is here:
http://www.komododigital.com/. Works on NT-based machines only (i.e.,
NT/2000/XP Pro) not on Windows 98/ME/XP Home. Will work on those
eventually with agents but right now they concentrate on "agent-free"
deployment.

There's a project here http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmapsql. which
uses nmap results sent to a SQL database.

And another project at Sourceforge is Cheops
http://cheops-ng.sourceforge.net
which seems to be closer to what you (and I) want.
It will detect hosts and devices, identify the OS and probe for what
services are running (in some cases, even identify the program running
the service). A Linux client-server program which needs agents on the
network machines (I think) or at least nmap.
 
Back
Top