Nmap Man Pages

Hey All,

For those of you who are not on the Nmap mailing list, there have been new MAN pages released. Pretty good expansion from the old man pages. Great reading for those of you that are new to Scanning or Network Security in general.

Here is the original email:

Nmap Hackers,

I have written a brand new man page for Nmap which is more comprehensive (more than twice as long) and better organized than the previous one. It is meant to serve as a quick-reference to virtually all Nmap command-line arguments, but you can learn even more about Nmap by reading it straight through. The 18 sections include "Firewall/IDS Evasion and Spoofing", "Timing and Performance", "Port Scanning Techniques", and much more. It even documents some cool features that are slated for release in the next Nmap version (runtime interaction and parallel DNS resolution). If you have suggestions for improvement, please send them my way.

The HTML version is available at:
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/man/

Or you can download and install/read the man page in Nroff format
from:
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/data/nmap.1

If you want to send patches, please base them on the DocBook XML source code of the man page at:
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/data/man-built.xml

This is also a call for translations of the new man page. The old version was translated to Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian, Portuguese, Lithuanian, and Latvian. I'd like to see the new man page even more accessible to people all over the World! So if you are fluent in English and another language, I'd love to have your help in translating the man page.

The file to translate is the man-built.xml file above. PLEASE DON'T TRANSLATE THE HTML OR NROFF DIRECTLY. Obviously you only need to translate the text from the XML, not the tag names or attributes. You can use any XML or plain text editor (I wrote it in emacs). The file has an "Author" section where you can list yourself or your group as the translator(s) and any translation-related notes you wish to add.
I highly recommend that you write me when starting the project. I'll let you know if you are the only one working on the language. If more than one person volunteers to do a certain language, I'll put you in touch with each other. You can then coordinate, such as dividing the sections between yourselves. Once you send me the translated XML file, I'll convert it to HTML and Nroff and post the results to Insecure.Org. They will also be shipped along with the English man page in Nmap release tarballs.

While translating the man page to a new language is a lot of work, thousands of people will benefit. The Spanish, French, Italian, and German HTML translations of the old page each receive more than a thousand requests per month. The Russian and Portuguese translations are approaching that level. That doesn't include people who read the nroff man pages on their systems or get the docs from the tarball.

Cheers,
Fyodor