Porky Port Scanner is a small portable Windows application that can be used to scan a network for open ports. We have to specify an IP address and ports range for scanning the network. The results can also be saved to a text file for later reference.
Why do we need port scanner?
People who have to work with networking often face problems such as one or more IP addresses are not reachable or ports are not responding. In order to check whether everything is working in order, we can use a software to see if the ports on an IP address or a range of IP addresses are visible to everyone and ready for connections.
Scanning ports with Porky Port Scanner
Porky Port Scanner is a small portable tool with a small window. In this window, you have to choose the types of ports that you want to scan – TCP, UDP, or both. You can also skip to host discovery which can be used to see if an IP address is available and online.
After you have selected type of ports, we can add a network IP address (such as 8.8.8.8) or IP address range ( such as 8.8.8.1-10). We also have to specify a port (such as 21) or a range of ports (such as 1-99). In the case of host discovery, you do not have to enter any ports because it is not going to scan ports in that case.
We can click on the small “Play” button to start scanning. We can choose what kind of response we want to see – open ports, close ports or verbose. When the scanning is finished we can click on the disk icon to save the output to a text file.
Changing ports scanning speed
Even though Porky Ports Scanner is a very small application, it does offer some options that can be modified to change the way it scans the ports. For example, in the preferences of Porky Port Scanner, we can change the speed of TCP ports scanning which is 200 ports per minute by default. Similarly, we can change the speed of scanning the UDP ports. We can increase the ports scanning speed to get the results faster. But sometimes networks do not respond when we scan their ports very fast so we can reduce the ports scanning speeds.
Conclusion
While Porky Port Scanner works really good in retrieves the results as expected, it lacks some newer features. For example, it does not supports IPv6 addresses and we can scan only older IPv4 addresses. The user has to be well versed in known ports such as 21 for FTP or 80 for HTTP because it does not auto-fill common ports.
You can download Porky Port Scanner from https://www.turnssoft.com/porky-port-scanner.html.