Cleaning up problems with NMAP on Mac OS X

NMAP, security softwareLet us first make one point crystal clear – every person on the planet running the Apple Mac OS X operating system must have the finest open source network security scanner, NMAP, installed on their machine. The previous statement isn’t entirely true, but I’m inclined to plug exceptional work. And NMAP is exceptional work. As well as available for most operating systems too.

If you don’t know what the program does, just run along right now. But if you’ve been using this impeccable chunk of code, and are now having problems getting it running (say after updating to Snow Leopard and/or updating NMAP itself), read on.

I was having this problem, and a few simple steps solved it. With the latest version, 5.50, I did the following to get the GUI interface running again:

1) Unhide your otherwise hidden files. If you don’t know how to do this, it is once again time to move on.

2) Under /usr/local/bin/ delete ncat, ndiff, nmap, and nping.

3) Under /usr/local/share/ delete the ncat and nmap directories.

4) Under /Applications delete the Zenmap application icon.

5) Empty your trash. If you don’t know how to empty your trash, skidoodle out of here (after tossing your Mac out of the port side window of a boat floating over the Mariana Trench).

6) Open the latest download of NMAP (i.e. the dmg file) and run the executable.

If you’ve cleaned up properly, you can now click on the Zenmap icon and run NMAP just fine.

Or at least performing the above worked for me.

MG signing off (to figure out what this NMAP thing does)

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10 Responses to Cleaning up problems with NMAP on Mac OS X

  1. Matt says:

    This does not work for Mac OS X Lion.

  2. Mike Pirotte says:

    Tried this twice still doesn’t work

  3. morth says:

    And it’s 2012 and Zenmap still doesn’t work. Might as well switch back to Linux. §#$%!

  4. Randall Hernández says:

    Hi everyone, check the official page of zenmap you will find that there is a beta version that works fine in MAC OS X Lion, check the link: http://nmap.org/download.html
    I’m testing the beta and works fine.

  5. packetcrafter says:

    Thanks for the article. I had the beta but could not get zenmap to launch. I do not use zenmap really but the fact that it would not launch bothered me to no end.

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