Thank you, Renaud, for explaining things. I now have a little more
direction. And I agree with the philosophy that "Nessus is a _scanner_,
an engine, not an all-in-one vulnerability management tool", which many
of us seem to forget. There is an old article
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/print.pl?sid=05/03/12/142205
which says "We were not so impressed by Internet Scanner 7.0 or Nessus
2.0.6, both of which lack the strong reporting capabilities of Qualys
and Foundstone, as well as the ability to map networks, track
remediation efforts, and automate scans and updates to the
vulnerabilities database." They just did not understand the philosophy
of making a tool that does one thing well.
Jimmy Crossley
Jcrossley-at-conetrix-dot-com
-----Original Message-----
From: nessus-bounces@list.nessus.org
[mailto:nessus-bounces@list.nessus.org] On Behalf Of Renaud Deraison
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 13:05
To: nessus@list.nessus.org
Subject: Re: NessusWX detached scan revisited again
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 12:55:28PM -0600, Jimmy Crossley wrote:
So the options are either to use batch mode with the Windows scheduler
for NessusWX or using the regular Nessus client with the batch-mode
option, right? Keeping a session tied up while the scan is running is
not an option for us, since we all use laptops and take them with us
everywhere we go. Not being able to run detached scans makes things
more complicated and more difficult for non-technical people to run
scans. We had planned on having non-technical people run the scans
and
then the more technical people review the reports. I, myself, like
being able to go through the GUI, piece by piece, and when I get
everything set like I want it, start the scan and let it send me email
when it's finished.
Detached scans have been written a very very long time ago when the
communication channel between Nessus and the client was buggy at best
(this is from the pre-OpenSSL days, back in 0.x, when nessusd would
close the communication channel due to a "lack of entropy"). It was
mostly implemented as a band-aid at the time.
We now have a robust communication channel which make the sessions
un-necessary, and the sessions actually messed up the code more than
what I could sustain, which is why I removed the feature altogether - as
I have said numerous times, Nessus is a _scanner_, an engine, not an
all-in-one vulnerability management tool.
What you probably want to do is to move away from sessions and use
a web interface instead. There are several interfaces to Nessus out
there, both free (GPL) and commercial (just avoid giving money to one of
these companies which have never contributed anything back to the
project except insults about me my back).
-- Renaud
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