I spent some time this week figuring out how to configure Knoppix so that I could run Nessus using the latest plugins. Turns out it wasn't necessarily just a matter of deleting the symbolic link to nessusd.conf, recreating it on the RAM drive and then editing it to point Nessus to look to a directory on the RAM drive where one could place all of the plugins (including the newest ones). Well, at least not if you wanted to use the nessus-update-plugins script which insists on downloading the plugins to the lib/nessus/plugins directory away from the script. I ended up having to make a copy of nessus-update-plugins script, and editing it so it would download the plugins to the location I wanted (the RAM drive).
Seems to me that this is not just an esoteric issue for configuring Knoppix. I can easily imagine someone editing the nessus.conf file to point to a different plugins directory and later running nessus-update-plugins, not knowing (or remembering) that this script will not download the plugins (or at least it doesn't appear to) to the directory specified in nessusd.conf. And then running Nessus, thinking it is using the latest plugins. If this is the case, I would think possibly a better scenario would be to either: a) change the nessus-update-plugins script to accept another parameter - a path for the script to download the plugins to or b) have the nessus-update-plugins script determine what path to download the plugins to by reading the plugins path from nessusd.conf If I'm way off base here, let me know. ~Kevin Davis� What could possibly go wrong?
