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Some tips to discover the operative system that runs on the target machine.

TTL

The default values of TTL on a ICMP packet, shown in the following table, can help us to identify the operative system:

Operative System TTL
Windows 128
Linux 64
Solaris / AIX 254
OpenBSD 255
FreeBSD 5.0 64
FreeBSD 3.4, 4.0 255
Cisco 254

The following example is for a Linux device:

❯ ping localhost
PING localhost(localhost (::1)) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.053 ms
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.051 ms