full-disclosure - Nessus experience

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Message-ID: <009401c4b1c4$8a1058d0$1600000a@spinoza>
From: samir at teknotrends.com (Samir Kelekar)
Subject: Nessus experience

Nessus takes too much time as what happens is that all the plugins get
passed from
nessusd to the nessus client, and then back to the nessusd. This happens
even if you
want to run a few (and not all) plugins. Nessus does not have a way to
choose only
a few plugins in the nessusd itself while it is running.
 The only way nessus provides of choosing plugins is
via the nessus client.

One way to get around the problem is to only load those plugins that nessusd
needs,
and not use the Nessus Client to choose/override the plugins. This would
require
that you restart nessusd everytime you want a different set of plugins.
This speeds nessus
runs considerably.

If you are looking for an already built solution that does the above, look
at our
web-site http://www.teknotrends.com or mail me off-line.

Thanks,
Samir Kelekar
Teknotrends Software
Bangalore.

> Greetings, full-disclosure!
>
> From time to time I find myself needing to estimate the time it takes
> to run Nessus against various network ranges.  For some reason, it
> always seems to take longer than I expect, and I'm wondering if:
>
>   1: I am doing something wrong (this is always a possibility)
>   2: Nessus has been getting slower over time
>
> Specifically, with two laptops (each with 2GHz processor, and upwards
> of 600MB RAM), I recently tried to scan a range of two class C-size
> networks, to which I was directly connected via Ethernet.  I had already
> done full nmaps of the hosts (this took about an hour), so I was not
> running nmap from within Nessus.  I found that after over three hours,
> I had only been able to complete tests on 90-something hosts.
>
> This strikes me as unreasonably slow, for bulk automated testing, so
> first, I'd like to ask if these performance metrics are in line with
> others' experiences.  I'd also solicit any hints people might have
> to offer on how they optimize performance, any rules of thumb anyone
> might care to share about estimating times for Nessus runs.
>
> Thanks, in advance, to all helpful replies.
>
> --Foofus.
>
>
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