metasploit nmap VMware Fusion 5

Question

Has anyone had success using nmap within msfconsole to target a specific host on a VM virtual network?

For example, the following command works from a Terminal prompt:

nmap -sT -A 172.16.187.128

However, the same command run from msfconsole results in dnet: Failed to open device vmnet

msf > nmap -sT -A 172.16.187.128
[*] exec: nmap -sT -A 172.16.187.128
Starting Nmap 6.25 ( http://nmap.orgz) at 2013-06-04 00:23 MDT
dnet: Failed to open device vmnet2
QUITTING!

I've seen some answers on the Internet suggesting the problem is the virtual network, but since the same nmap command works from Terminal I have doubts about the answers I've seen.

Thanks!

Answer 1

For what its worth I've seen the same issue with Fusion 6 and nmap. I also saw tcpdump fail as well:

sudo tcpdump -i vmnet8
tcpdump: vmnet8: No such device exists
(BIOCSETIF failed: Device not configured)

After upgrading libpcap to 1.40 and this still not resolving the problem, I found the following outdated post: https://communities.vmware.com/message/693833#693833

Specifically this quote is where the issue lies: "No guarantees, but we can try to take a look at implementing BPF on Fusion's network interfaces in a future release."

This seems to point to the issue being a vmware problem, so I tried VirtualBox 4.3.0 and when using NAT at least, the issues do not occur (nmap also worked for me):

$ ifconfig
…
vboxnet0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 0a:00:00:00:00:00
inet 192.168.56.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.56.255

$ sudo tcpdump -i vboxnet0
tcpdump: WARNING: vboxnet0: That device doesn't support promiscuous mode
(BIOCPROMISC: Operation not supported on socket)
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on vboxnet0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes