Trinity doing her Nmap thing
Nmap is constantly upgrading, so it’s best to have the latest version. Especially when you factor in its application identification and NSE functionality, which benefit significantly from being fresh.
The problem for us is that while new versions of Nmap have .rpm files ready to go, there are no .deb versions released for Debian/Ubuntu users.
TL;DR: Download latest, .rpm, convert with alien, and install with dpkg.
But there’s a solution. All you have to do is an extra step using a command called alien that converts RPM files to DEB files. So here’s the whole sequence.
Download the latest RPM package
Change the package name according to whatever’s latest.
wget https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.rpm
Make sure you have alien installed
You can also just install from source as well.
You might not probably don’t have alien installed. So let’s get it.
apt install alien
Convert the RPM file to a DEB file using alien
Now alien is installed and you can use it to convert the RPM into a DEB file.
alien nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.rpm
Install the DEB package
You may have to uninstall ndiff if you have it installed. apt remove ndiff.
So now you have a working .deb package that you can install.
dpkg -i nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.deb
And now you should have the latest version of nmap.
nmap –version
Nmap version 7.60 ( https://nmap.org )
Happy scanning!
