Re: [Nessus-devel] Nessus server and Cygwin

[Renaud Deraison <deraison_at_nessus.org>]

On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 02:00:38AM -0700, Jay Jacobson wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Vesselin Peev wrote:
> 
> > What is the status of the Nessus server part on Cygwin?
> > Has anyone succeeded in building it and running it without problems?
> 
> 
> I am not aware of any success running Nessus on Windows using Cygwin. Take
> a look through the archives of the Nessus lists - this topic has come up
> many times.

I actually I did manage to compile Nessus once with cygwin, after having
spent a long time on it. If you look at the various build scripts,
you'll actually notice some cygwin hooks.

The problem is that once compiled under cygwin, you get a very very slow
nessusd. Why ? Because nessusd uses fork(). Tons of it. A heavy scan
can trigger a couple of dozen of fork() each second. On Unix systems,
fork() is a very cheap operation so that works fine. On Win32, there is
no fork() call, so cygwin emulates one by loading the binary in memory
and copying its stack and heap in it. That's very intensive memory wise
and CPU wise, up to the point that it makes Nessus barely useable.

So in that regard, NeWT is definitely the way to go.


				-- Renaud