Hi Randal,

Tenable's focus right now for Nessus 3 is to produce both Windows
ad OS X distributions for Nessus 3. We may add Gentoo, but the
demand right now is from armies of consultants (most who don't
pay for anything from Tenable BTW) armed with OS X laptops and
seven-day old vulnerability checks.

I'm sorry you feel chained to Nessus at this point. Pretty much
the same folks who started Nessus and have been supporting it
over the years are with Tenable. We've added a lot of new users
to Nessus and I feel really great about that.

Even though there have been some forks of Nessus 2, Tenable is
still maintaining the original Nessus 2 code base. It should
compile fine for Gentoo and has also been updated since the
Nessus 3 release.

I'd rather not discuss the merits of the decision to close
source the Nessus 3 engine here as it has been discussed at length
already. I could not do justice to the volume of posts on various
blogs, slashdot and many news articles.

Ron Gula
Tenable Network Security


At 04:52 PM 3/5/2006, Randal T. Rioux wrote:
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Hash: RIPEMD160

I went to try the (relatively) new version 3 today. After filling out
the form, I was given a few platforms for the binary to choose from.
Turns out Nessus 3 only works on the horrible Red Hat (-esque) Linux
distributions (or FreeBSD). I've always used Gentoo and OpenBSD. Gentoo
has a hard masked package for it, but it doesn't work yet. I'm sure I
could hack away at the RPM, but that seems messy and unnecessary. How is
the schedule looking for supporting other Linux distributions?

Are there any updates on <gulp> OpenVAS? Seems like that was a knee-jerk
reaction that is fading away. I hope not, because if it works as
planned, it will be our only hope to break the chains of locked-in
distribution support.

Another pet peeve - if I want to download a binary again (or for another
OS) I need to complete the form each time. If you want to keep track of
downloads, try to make it a little easier (perhaps an account for access)?

Though I for the most part agree with the point that Nessus was being
used by some evil people for profit on other's labor, this may have been
a drastic step. How has the new system benefited Tenable? Was there ever
consideration to use another type of license that would allow the
release of source code, but not the use for profit by product integration?

Thanks,

- --
Randal T. Rioux | Procyon Labs
IT Security R&D and Consulting
Virtual: www.procyonlabs.com
Physical: DC / Baltimore
PGP: gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0xD08D1941

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