All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Port Scanning VPS and Dedicated servers for firewall checks
stupidgenius
Member
I know most, if not all, provider's Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) or Terms of Service (TOS) here usually don't allow port scanning for the obvious reason it correlates highly with misuse and abuse actors.
However, I would like to scan IP addresses and related domains for my own servers (VPS, VDS, and Dedicated). Adding to the difficulty of this is the fact that some servers are spread out over different providers so I can't just get permission from a single host, I would need to get permission from both the origin host for outbound scanning AND the target host for inbound scanning.
Besides something like Shodan.io or other paid commercial services aimed at enterprise, how best to confirm your service's firewall/iptables are setup properly for personal/hobby project servers? I have used grc.com's Shields Up before but that is local browser based to the currently used IP.
Any information or assistance people could provide would be appreciated.
Thanks
Comments
In theory yes but in practice, if both the scanning and scanned server are under your control, nobody will report this as unauthorized scanning 🤔
There are providers that don't care if you do any port scanning against any host.
Some providers don't mind it as long as its your own servers within the same account like DigitalOcean or OVH.
If you aren't doing aggressive mass scanning, you won't have much problems.
Just use any paid VPN provider. Most of them will only block outbound 25.
That is fair and I figured one off scans probably would not raise any flags on most hosts, but knowing my luck, I would get flagged by overly proactive network admins.
yeah that works too. Sometimes, I just use my own Residential internet to scan and no problems
Hetzner is probably the only one I've seen that is pretty aggressive against port scans in or out.
given that i had to block their range, theyre certainly doing something wrong.
That is a good idea, I didn't think of that. Probably the best option.
True, it probably would be fine, I was just worried that if it was flagged it would block me from directly access the services from that IP.
If you own the server, you control who gets blocked.
Could you share their names?
I only lease the VPS, VDS, or Dedicated hardware. I don't own the IP space or DC network control. Is it probably pretty rare to be flagged as the owner/lessee of both sides of scan, but it is not impossible if DC Network Admins are monitoring for port scanning.
Most providers will be fine. Fell free to PM me. Will give you some hints.