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Hping3 vs. Nmap

Posted by michael on from the knock-knock dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ONLamp.com Security section has published an interesting interview with Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of hping. Among other things, it talks about nmap, idle-scan, and low level network analisys with simple Tcl scripts."

4 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Nice comment on Tcl by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Interesting
    > I use Tcl for everything not involving
    > low-level things or speed.

    I feel the same way about Ruby. It's just not worth the hassle of plowing thru 20 lines of try catch blocks in Java when I can do something like
    File.read(myfile).grep(/foo/).size
    with Ruby. Good times!
    --
    The Army reading list
  2. A fascinating read by jd · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Just one thought, though. I don't think it's a case of hping3 versus nmap, as the two are aimed at different problems. I personally like them both, and use them in those areas they're good at. (But, then, I tend to collect tools, as if they were going out of fashion. I've crates of CD Roms of Open Source and Freeware utilities, most of which I'll likely never use, but the seeing what exists is so fun that it makes it worth it.)


    Ok, maybe one other thought. TCL is a cool language - though it has a history of incompatiable changes, which I don't like, and it has never been as thread-friendly as other languages. It's not essential, for a networking problem, but it's very handy.


    I've not used Ruby, but the example another poster gave was enough to convince me that it's a language worth learning. I like clean solutions to clean problems. I honestly think the maintainer for HPing3 might do well to support additional languages, including Ruby.


    Actually, if HPing3 is going to be split into two products - the front interface and the libraries - then it should be possible to split off the API for the Tcl stuff, and provide plugs so that others could supply interfaces to other languages.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. why not Perl? by jeif1k · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why not make hping a Perl script, with no C code? Perl already has the bindings to libpcap, libdnet, and libnet, so hping would not require any native code installation on many systems. And the kind of people likely to use hping are also a bit more likely to already know perl.

    (I'm not making any argument as to the relative merits of Perl or Tcl as languages--as languages, I would prefer something else anwyay. But Perl's extensive collection of libraries often makes it the path of least resistance.)

    1. Re:why not Perl? by endx7 · · Score: 2, Funny

      mmm...CPAN