Network scanning is an exercise for identifying active hosts on a network, either for analyzing purpose or security assessment, you may need some tools to help you on performing such exercises. There are lots of network scanning tools out there, some of them are free, some of them are chargeable and some of them are hardware appliance. I will not talk about hardware appliance as that is too expensive for us to use, and it is not practical for a single user usage, unless you are a hacker or trying to setting up a marvelous network environment in your own territory and willing to spend a lot on all these devices.

After perform network scanning, it is always good to have additional features provided by the tool itself, such as services monitoring, wake on LAN, remote shutdown and etc. Definitely, it will be good if the tool is free of charge.

I would like to introduce one network scanning tool named SoftPerfect Network Scanner. This tool not only provide network scanning capability, also it allow you to perform wake on LAN, monitor services, monitor registry, monitor WMI, and also some other fancy features that you can use to troubleshoot network issues, such as Telnet, SMTP, etc.

Sometimes if you would like to verify the same services on 10 servers, the primitive way is to remote desktop to each of the single server and verify one by one, alternately, you can still use command line to achieve that or you can still write a script to do that for you. But if it is an ad-hoc request to check multiple services on multiple servers, it will be a trouble for us. But with SoftPerfect Network Scanner, you are able to define multiple services, to query on multiple servers just in few minutes. Furthermore, you can easily define customize services that are not belong to Windows services.

In addition, this tool also allows you to remote wake up a machine, all you need to do is key in the target machine MAC address, and then issue a wake up instruction. One of the disadvantage for this tool, is this tool do not provide the capability of keeping search records in database form. Anyway, I personally think this tool provides more than what I expect, as a lightweight network scanner tool and some more it is FREE to download.

For those who are interested, you can try this by go to the below link.
Download SoftPerfect Network Scanner


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