Updating Plugins During A Scan

[George Theall]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 05:01:42AM -0800, Pete Vingh wrote:

> The way that I see plugin updates work is like this:
> 
>   - nessusd is waiting for a connection
>   - nessus-update-plugins gets called
>   - nessus-update-plugins kills/stops nessusd
>   - plugins are updated
>   - nessus-update-plugins starts nessusd
> 
> Is that correct?

Somewhat.  nessus-update-plugins doesn't exactly kill / stop nessusd. 
Rather, it sends it a HUP signal, which causes nessusd to reload itself,
blocking client connections until it's finished. 

In addition, nessusd forks to service each client connection.  Each
child thread holds a a snapshot of the plugins that parent knew about
when it was created and is is unaffected by the HUP signal sent by
nessus-update-plugins. This means that a currently running scan will
not know about plugins added once it starts.

George
-- 
theall at tifaware.com
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