Last Review: November 16, 2011

After over a year of work, NetScanTools Pro version 11 was released on April 4, 2011. There are many new and improved things in this release that I'm sure you will be interested in. This is a true major release.

New Interface - it has been completely updated. It is still an 'outlook' style interface - it has a left panel control bar and tools appear on the right side. This updated interface gave us the ability to bring back 'Favorites' - something that was present in the old 'tabbed' interface of the earlier versions of NetScanTools Pro. Click on the image below for a slideshow with images of many of the tools in version 11:

We enhanced and simplified by clearly showing the intended use of each tool. This meant that some tools were split into two parts. Some tools and descriptions within tools were renamed to conform to industry standard conventions, for example 'Setup' was a more common term when NetScanTools was first released, but now 'Settings' is more common and better understood.

IPv6 is becoming a hot topic and this is the first release of NetScanTools that adds real IPv6 support. More on IPv6 below.

Results Database - we first introduced the results database in NetScanTools LE and now it as been extended into NetScanTools Pro. The purpose of it is to retain all your queries for future review. It is also the source for generating reports.

Automated Tools were completely rewritten. The Automated Tools now use an engine to operate each manual tool given the input and the results are saved to the database. In previous versions, the Automated tools were actually a duplicate of the manual tool that did the same action - definitely not efficient.

New Tools - Connection Monitor (replaces Connection Detection), MAC Address to Manufacturer, Network Interfaces - Wireless, Routing Table - IPV4, and SNMP Scanner Tool.

Additions to existing tools:

ARP was split in two parts for clarity: ARP Cache and ARP Scan (MAC Scan).

DNS Tools - Core now has IPv6 Simple Query lookups, Get Basic DNS Records now retrieves the IPv6 AAAA records, we added Flush Default DNS Cache and Edit DNS HOSTS File.

DNS Tools - Advanced has three new tools, IPv4 or Hostname to ASN, Get VOIP SRV Records and Get Misc SRV Records.

Packet Generator now supports sending ARP/RARP packets and RAW packets. RAW packets means that you craft the whole packet from the destination and source ethernet header MAC addresses all the way to the end. And we've added a new tool to help you do that: a Hex Editor.

Ping now supports IPv6 addresses.

Ping Scanner (AKA NetScanner) has the ability to resolve IPv4 addresses using either the Default System DNS or a specific DNS. We also added Scan Delay Time to slow it down if necessary and added a way to import an IPv4 list into it. To simplify results, we made the columns dynamic in other words they appear and disappear according to the additional scan tasks settings.

Port Scanner was completely rewritten and works much better than the v10.x predecessor. It's much faster and more accurate. We've added a section for scanning commonly used ports and there's an editor for that list in case you need to change it.

Promiscuous Mode Scanner adds the Multicast Address 3 test.

Service Lookup replaces the old Database Tests.

SMTP Server Tests now supports STARTTLS and you can select the Protocol (TLS1, SSL2, SSL3), Algorithm (DES, 3 DES, MD5, RC4, SHA) and Minimum Key (40-256 bit) Preferences (not all settings are supported in all operating systems).

SNMP was split in two for clarity, Core and Advanced. It now supports all modes of SNMPv3 (you may need to obtain the OpenSSL libeay32.dll for support the authPriv encrypted mode - we cannot distribute that). We have added WalkBulk, GetNext and GetBulk to the Core tool. The Advanced tool has a launcher for both the Dictionary Attack Tool and the new SNMP Scanner Tool. The Dictionary Attack tool is much faster than before in terms of loading a list of IPs and clearing the display.

Whois now supports IPv6 input queries and if you enter a domain, we attempt to do an IPv6 and IPv4 address resolution on the 'www.' prefixed hostname. History buttons have been added so that you can view previous whois queries made during the current session - they operate much like a web browser forward and back.

This brings us to overall design considerations. Favorites was a common request during the lifetime of version 10. It was not easily done in version 10, but it was a priority in version 11. You can now check a box on each manual tool to add it to the left panel Favorites group. As mentioned above, we now have a mandatory results database. This is required so that we can bring up historical reports from each tool both manual and automated. As in 10.x, reports are shown in the web browser - the database gives us the method to be able to show old reports from other sessions. Running more than one tool at a time is important to some customers, so this new program shell gave us the methods for doing so. The left panel now has tool groupings like DNS Tools, Packet Tools etc. This helps users find tools they need quickly. IPv6 will be a continuing focus of version 11. We have some support in there now, but as version evolves, more IPv6 compatibility will be added - stay tuned!

We do not have a demo available yet, but there is a video here and more videos will be recorded shortly.