Re: Optimizing Nessus

Jefferson Cowart wrote:
> (It currently takes about 8
> hours to go through that /21 range. Considering that many students only turn
> their computers on when they are using them I'm worried that I will be more
> likely to miss them if I only get about 3 chances a day.)

What's taking the most time, is it the portscan or the actual plugins/tests?
If it's nmap then I think you can speed it up. Since you have a specific 
set of plugins, you probably also know the ports that should be scanned. 
Then you could just tell nessus/nmap to only scan those ports.

What about pinging, do you have "dont ping the remote host" on? If you 
do, it will take quite a long time, to scan a host that arn't actually 
there.

You could also try to have more scans running in parallel, if your 
scanner can handle it?

> The boxes that the Nessus servers are running on are PIII's (733 and 866)
> with either 256 or 512 of memory. If it would make a difference I can
> probably bump that memory up, but I would like some advice on if it will
> make much of a difference.

I would like to know this as well, what's the biggest bottleneck in a 
system, cpu, mem, io, net, or maybe something completly different?


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