Dan Griffin's Blog
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Running Nmap on Vista
November 22, 2006
I installed the latest Alpha version (4.20RC1) of Nmap (from http://insecure.org/nmap/download.html) on my Vista RC1 x86 machine. Unfortunately, nmap fails to run out of the box. Here’s what I found and how I fixed it.
First, I got a runtime error due to a missing dll dependency:
"nmap.exe - Unable To Locate Component.
This application has failed to start because NPPTools.dll was not found."
and nmap spews a console message to the effect that iphlpapi.dll is missing. The console message appears to be wrong. As a work-around, I copied the npptools.dll that I happened to have on my XPSP2 machine to the same directory as nmap.exe on the Vista machine. Problem solved.
Note, I don’t know where that dll actually came from - is it present on a pristine XP machine? Add/Remove Programs on my XP machine shows no indication of having installed netmon, which is where I thought that dll came from. But then I installed Netmon Beta 3 from http://connect.microsoft.com on the Vista machine to see if it includes npptools.dll. It doesn’t.
Anyway, once you get past the dependency error, you’ll next see the following error, which is documented in the newsgroups:
C:\Program Files\Nmap>nmap -v -A some_machine
Starting Nmap <-- snip -->
getinterfaces: intf_loop() failed
QUITTING!
I couldn’t find a documented fix, though. My fix is to line 20 of libdnet-stripped\src\intf-win32.c in the latest nmap code distribution, based on ipifcons.h from the Vista Platform SDK.
#define MIB_IF_TYPE_MAX MAX_IF_TYPE /* XXX - ipifcons.h */
Without the fix, at runtime, the Vista machine enumerates at least one network interface of a type outside the range of those recognized by nmap, causing the tool to give up. With the fix, plus the above dll, everything seems to work. I’ve submitted the code change, but I don’t know when a patched binary will be made available for download.
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