If you see absolutely nothing come up but you know an IP is active with open services, either the machine isn’t broadcasting, the recipient machine is rejecting all requests, or perhaps a strong firewall is configured. The port scan will go quite high as it scans, so just let it run if you want to see everything. Visible ports are going to differ per machine depending on what services and servers are available, but if you’re scanning Macs and PC’s you’ll commonly find web servers, SMB Windows sharing port 445, AFP Apple File Sharing on port 548, maybe active visible SSH server on 22, UDP servers, and potentially a wide variety of others.

For example, you may see something like this if you scan localhost (127.0.0.1): Let the Port Scan tool run and you will quickly start to see any open TCP ports and their traditionally identified usage. Optional, but not necessarily recommended, you can set a port range to scan between if you just want to search for a specific set of active servicesġ27.0.0.1 or “localhost” will just check the local Mac for open ports, if you’re new to port scanning that may be the preferred way to go since most reasonably well secured remote domains reject incoming requests or don’t respond to them.Enter the IP or domain name you wish to scan for open ports and choose “scan”.Hit Command+Spacebar to summon Spotlight and type “Network Utility” followed by the return key to launch the Network Utility app.

You can choose any local or remote IP to scan, if you’re solitary on a network (or even air gapped) and still want to try this out yourself, use the loopback IP of “127.0.0.1” as the target: How to Scan Ports on an IP or Domain from Mac OS X For the purpose of this walkthrough we’ll use Spotlight to launch Network Utility and start the scan since it’s the easiest and quickest route, though if you plan on using the tool often you’ll probably want to make an alias yourself. Quick sidenote: remember that newer releases of Mac OS X have relocated Network Utility to be buried in a system folder, that doesn’t mean it can’t be used, it just means you have to either make an alias, launch it from Spotlight, or get to it from System Info.

Advanced ip scanner osx