Network Mapper

Preface

In an MSP (managed service provider), gathering information when on-boarding a new account is critical. Often times, this can be non-billable work and will usually take a couple of hours to get the necessary information. Some of the information gathering can be automated. I built a node application that would run these routine tasks.

The idea is to install the app on a Raspberry PI and plug in to the prospective customers network. Once initiated, the app runs an NMap scan on the known local networks. Alongside the NMAP scan, the app will run WHOIS lookups on the configured domains. Using the WHOIS information and DNS information, we can look up things like MX records. The MX record gives us information for which email service the domain uses. The last piece is a form where the tech could submit the gathered information to a central collection repository.

Technical Decisions

This is a monolithic JS application. There is no compilation step on the server as it is just JS with ESM imports. It communicates to a Postgres database running in a docker container. I wanted to use the most performant and the fastest libraries I could find for a JS app. I decided to use Fastify for the server and Solid.js for the UI. This is a great minimal stack for full-stack JS applications. The frontend communicates with a rest api provided by fastify; then live scans can be pushed to the client using web-sockets.