PortScan

by Craig Beech


PortScan is a useful utility for finding out what networking services a machine has. It uses the basic premise that services are allocated a port, and, if the program is able to connect to that port using TCP, then that service is available. This allows the program to detect anything from a Telnet to a Web daemon.

Using PortScan
PortScan is very easy to use. Just load the application, click on its icon on the icon bar to open the main window, and select either Internet socket service or Internet socket port, depending on how you want the results to be sorted (either alphabetically for the service or numerically by the port number).

Type the Internet address that you want to be scanned into the writable icon and click on Scan or press Return. The window will show a list of any matched service entries that were found.

Note that the Internet address can be anything from IP addresses to full Internet domain addresses. However, if the Internet module is unable to resolve an address, this may result in the application crashing.

Click Menu anywhere in the main window to open the main PortScan menu. This allows you to save the list of matched entries as a text file, for printing out or exporting into a DTP package or word processor. The Clear entry removes all items in the list and in the writable icon, making the window exactly as it was when the program was first loaded.

Copyright  RISC User magazine 1997
