Friday, June 15, 2007
Tech: Parallels 3.0 causing NMAP errors?
I don't have any definitive proof, but it seems that installing Parallels 3.0 causes certain networking tools to break. I've noticed nmap 2.403 on my machine is broken since I upgraded to Parallels 3.0. I didn't suspect Parallels until I found another user ( dcortesi.com ) complaining about the same issue, as well as similhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifar reports on Parallels' forums regarding Cisco VPN client.Whenever I run nmap I would get the following error:
Starting Nmap 4.03 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2007-06-15 13:36 EDT
getinterfaces: Failed to obtain MAC address for ethernet interface (fw0)
QUITTING!
Following similar resolution procedures for the Cisco VPN client ( uninstall Parallels, Cisco VPN, then reinstalling Parallels before Cisco VPN client ), I decided to reinstall nmap on my system. After downloading, compiling, and installing the latest version of nmap the issue was fixed.
1) Download latest Nmap version
2) Unpack the archive
3)
cd nmap-4.21ALPHA4
./configure --prefix=/opt/local
make
sudo make install
Correction: should configure with the following options:
./configure --prefix=/opt/local --without-nmapfe
nmapfe is the GUI interface that uses GTK+ and X11 which we typically don't use on OS X
Labels: Mac OS X, network tools, nmap, Tech
Article Link posted by Jambo Consulting at 4:54 PM
4 Comments:
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Damon said...
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Bummer, didn't work for me. :-\ I should note that nmap works fine as a user, but not when running under sudo.
- 6/15/2007 09:29:00 PM
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Jambo Consulting said...
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Actually, after some more testing I found the same problem. Everything seems to work except in sudo. Odd.
- 6/19/2007 02:25:00 PM
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said...
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Sadly this doesn't work for everyone.
- 7/04/2007 07:25:00 AM
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Jambo Consulting said...
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There's a reply from Parallels about the NMAP situation.
http://forum.parallels.com/thread13298-2.html
Re Nmap behaviour:
Nmap 4.20 message about BPF device not available is misleading. Nmap is trying to bind BPF device to fw0 interface upon detecting that fw0 have IPv4 address. What nmap fails to check is whether fw0 is actually UP. If fw0 is down BIOCSETIF ioctl fails with appropriate error (interface is down) but the error code is not checked by nmap and the failure reported as BPF problem. If fw0 is UP nmap will complain that it's unable to obtain fw0 MAC address which is expected since fw0 is not an ethernet device. In both cases nmap ceases to function.... - 8/07/2007 04:33:00 PM
