Just how much data is transfered during login between Nessus client and server?

[Chris Buechler]

On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:43:05 +1300, Jason Haar <jason.haar at trimble.co.nz> wrote:
> 
> More of a comment than anything, but I just tried to run up nessus
> client at home to connect (over VPN) to our work Nessus server. It took
> 10 minutes to come up...
> 
> This is a 256K DSL link - not fast I know - but it implies there's a lot
> of traffic going on just to log into Nessus server.
> 
> (and yes, this is only one example - I done it over our internal WAN as
> well - Nessus takes ages to login to remote Nessus servers).
> 
> Am I right that this is a bandwidth issue?  Is it because all the
> dependancy checks are done on the client instead of the server?
> 

I run the Nessus client to nessusd across VPN all the time, the
slowest link being a 1 Mb uplink on the server's side.  The only
significant data transfer I've noticed is after you first connect to
the server, it pulls all the plugin info, which is a bit over 2 MB. 
Even at 256 Kb that's only about a minute.  Other than that initial
plugin load, everything else operates the same as it does over LAN.

Not sure where dependency checks are done, but the reason (or at least
one reason) it downloads all the plugin info is so you have the plugin
list in your client and can select/unselect whatever plugins you
desire.  The client has to know what plugins the server has.

-Chris