On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Kava Kicks wrote:

> Hmmm ...  I don't know that the goal of testing is to break things; 
> rather, it is to see if it *could* be broken .. but anyway ;)

A test that has broken its subject is a good test.
A test that has not broken its subject might be a good test on an 
unbreakable subject as well as a bad (insufficient, incorrect, 
improper...) test on a breakable subject.

> I think it was the portscan that did it. I have Nessus set up to carry
> out its default scan, then I also use Nmap as a secondary scanner.
> After I modified the Services.txt file (but left the Nmap settings
> alone), the crash no longer occurred.

Ah...the list of ports to be scanned was "default", right? "default"
stands "all ports found in services.tcp (all all TCP ports found in
/etc/services when services.tcp is not available)". You could do the same
think if you replaced "default" with an explicit list of ports minus the
port you want to avoid but I admit the list would be too long to be
practical. On the other hand, a list of intervals like "1-2048,2050-" can
be as good (if not better because it can find services listening on
obscure ports) as a sparse set of most popular ports in many cases.

> Just curious, why don't you think that modifying the services file is a
> good idea? Surely it is easier to modify one file that will only affect
> Nessus, instead of trying to create/modify a firewall rule that willl
> affect evertyhing on that machine?

You might convince the scanner to leave a certain port alone this way but
it cannot guarantee Nessus won't touch the port at all.

--Pavel Kankovsky aka Peak  [ Boycott Microsoft--http://www.vcnet.com/bms ]
"Resistance is futile. Open your source code and prepare for assimilation."



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