Updating Plugins During A Scan

[Rochford, Paul]

>From nessus-update-plugins:

# HUP nessusd
test -f ${prefix}/var/nessus/nessusd.pid && {
    pid=`cat ${prefix}/var/nessus/nessusd.pid`
    kill -1 $pid 2>/dev/null

I've very rarely had to kill nessusd and restart it after a plugins update.

Kind Rgds,
Paul Rochford




-----Original Message-----
From: nessus-bounces at list.nessus.org [mailto:nessus-bounces at list.nessus.org]
On Behalf Of Paul Johnston
Sent: 10 November 2004 15:48
Cc: nessus at list.nessus.org
Subject: Re: Updating Plugins During A Scan


Hi,

I am sure just sending Nessus a HUP is not quite enough for updating the 
plugins. I've updated the plugins, done a HUP, and had weird 
inconsistencies (and I'm not scanning; nessusd had no child processes). 
If I then fully stop and restart it's ok. This has happened repeatably 
with 2.0.7 (a little old I know).

Regards,

Paul



George Theall wrote:

>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
>  
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Paul Johnston
Internet Security Specialist
Westpoint Limited
Albion Wharf, 19 Albion Street,
Manchester, M1 5LN
England
Tel: +44 (0)161 237 1028
Fax: +44 (0)161 237 1031
email: paul at westpoint.ltd.uk
web: www.westpoint.ltd.uk

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