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Continuous Port Scanning

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by tnunetworksupport 1 view

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Would you know of a way to continuously scan for specific ports?

Please bear with me while I give you an explanation for my question. I'm the sys admin for a private Christian university. When we have students with computers, with time on theirhands, with a high level of intelligence, the result is that they install services/servers that shouldn't be on our network. Our policy is that no computer, except for a server within our department, can have services (http, ftp, telnet, smtp, etc.) installed.

A couple of our students are running such services, but in the wee hours of the morning (READ when the sys admin is asleep!). Therefore, I'm looking for a utility/product that will allow me to scan all four of our class C IP ranges, for specific ports, and run in a continuous loop.

Any assistance that you could provide would be greatly appreciated!

5 replies

by sixfourtykilo

Why scan when you can block? Allowing or not allowing certain IP ranges to use different ports is the way to go. If you would like them to be able to run chat clients, you may end up running in circles trying to get the right ports blocked. This is the best way to handle these situations.

Hope this helps.
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by adenfla

I agree with the last post. To have something that is scanning your network all the time is going to chew up some bandwith. You always have the option of using and IDS system like ISS Real Secure. You can have it watch for traffic on certain ports and report that to you. Another option, if you are set on scanning, is setup an old machine running Linux and install Snort or NMAP. With NMAP you can setup a script to run NMAP ever few minutes or hours. It is command line based which makes it easy for this task. I would recommend and IDS type system though. Does not chew up the bandwith and will monitor whatever you want.

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