Uptate nmap on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

  Recently on Pauldotcom Security Weekly, they had an interview with Gordon “Fyodor” Lyon from insecure.org. Before the podcast I could not find a way to upgrade nmap to the latest version on Ubuntu. I had tried several times to compile from source but nmap would not create all of the proper files. I could run

nmap -V

and nmap would still show the stale version from the ubuntu repositories. After listening to the Pauldotcom episode I checked out the insecure.org site and found out how to install the latest version using subversion.

  This procedure requires that you install subversion

sudo apt-get install subversion

  Next you can just type this in a terminal

svn co --username guest --password "" svn://svn.insecure.org/nmap/

  This will pull down the latest source and put it in a folder called nmap. If you want to update the directory later you can just cd into that folder and type "svn up". Next you can cd into the nmap directory and type

./configure 

  Next you can type

make

and finally

sudo make install

  Once the compiling is done you have the latest copy of nmap and you can start "mapping" away.

  I have taken the time to write a script to do the same as I have just explained. This way if there is a new version of nmap you can just give the script a small, easy to remember name and run it whenever you want to make sure you have the latest version of nmap.

#! /bin/bash

svn co --username guest --password "" svn://svn.insecure.org/nmap/ &&
cd nmap &&
svn up &&
./configure &&
make &&
sudo make install &&
nmap -V &&
echo 'done'

Enjoy!!!

Update.

  I have had trouble with compiling after doing an "svn up" from the previous version.

  I have added a line to the script that will test for the old nmap folder and if it is there, it will delete it and start fresh.