On Jun 11, 2007, at 8:53 AM, Devitto, Dom wrote:

"However if multiple SSH daemons are running on the remote host, then
problems may occur." -- Renaud

Can you speculate on what those problems could be, e.g. Does the Nessus server crash? Only login once per host ? Login repeatedly but overwrite the
previously collected information each time?


Most likely, in the case of a host running multiple SSH servers, the "problems" would be that every command really is executed on the first SSH server that nessusd could log into. So you end up with duplicate results, and you've executed the same commands twice on the remote server, but you have results nevertheless.

[I say "most likely" because this set up is not supported and has not really been tested. The worst-case scenario is that the SSH checks don't work - period.]


The reason for this behavior is that the SSH session is reused among plugins, so that we don't log in and out for every command being executed (which would be suboptimal and would drive your SIM guys crazy when they see that a user logged in successfully 40 times in less than 2mn). Instead we connect to the remote host using a special socket (a 'shared' socket) which can be re-used by other plugins. Which means that when a plugin tries to log into the remote SSH server, instead of telling nessusd "I want to connect to the remote host on port 22", they first ask "Do we have a SSH connection to the remote host already set up ?". If there is one such connection, then the plugin re-uses it. And as you probably noticed, the name SSH connection is not tied to a port.

Now, you'll still have the problem of the same plugin executing the same command twice on the remote host, which may cause duplicate results, etc...


                                        -- Renaud
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