Updating Plugins During A Scan

[George Theall]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 08:19:39AM -0600, George P Boutwell wrote:

>   Will the running scan use updated plugins that it already knew about when
> it started.  ie if the same plugin existed before the scan started, but was
> updated after the scan started but before it had run that plugin, which
> plugin would run the old one or the updated one?

The "snapshot" I mentioned earlier refers to a cache of the descriptive
part of plugins.  Other than that, nessusd opens the plugin and reads
the contents whenever it's needed.  Thus, if nessus-update-plugins
tweaks the code in a plugin, the new version will be used even by
currently-running scans.  However, if the description part is altered
(whether it's just the text description, a dependency, or something like
that), those changes will not be made available to existing scans. 

>   What about when a plugin is removed.  What happens then to the running
> scan if a plugin it knows about is removed before it gets to it?

It will be skipped, and an error will be logged in nessusd.dump. 

George
-- 
theall at tifaware.com
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