On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 02:40:34PM -0500, Branson Matheson wrote:
> I have seen this somewhat a few times in the mailing lists.. but no
> concrete answer. I am using nessus-1.3.x.. and have consistent problems
> with FreeBSD and finding all the hosts that nmap finds with no problem.
> I have started running nmap and using the output to get around the problem
> but it's rather a pita.
The problem lies in Nessus architecture - to ping a host, you need to
read raw packets, and to do that under BSD, each process willing to read
raw packets needs to open a /dev/bpfN.
Nessus has a workaround, which basically opens one bpf and shares it,
but it's far from being efficient. What I suggest is that you download
the latest version 1.3.x from CVS and read nessus-libraries/README.BPF
which basically will tell you how to create a lots of /deb/bpf (I
suggest 100, you should at least have 42). Once this is done, the
configure script will consider that you have enough /dev/bpf's and won't
compile the inefficient workaround.
-- Renaud
