I'm not sure about the official answer, however, in the past I had several scans interrupted by cron jobs updating the plugins. Especially over night scan jobs ;(
Updating the plugins in the middle of a scan causes Nessus to return completely unreliable results. Basically, non of the plugins executed after the update interrupted, and even the port scans came back as bogus. To fix this problem I wrote a wrapper script around nessus-update-pluggins: nessus-plugin-logger.pl available at my website http://www.breakingrobots.net/programs/nessus/ -----Original Message----- From: Don Whiteside [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 24, 2003 10:35 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: On the use of nessus-update-plugins with cron... At 02:16 PM 3/24/2003 +0100, Renaud Deraison wrote: >However, while doing some housekeeping work on nessus.org, I saw that >some persons set their cronjobs to fetch the new plugins _every five >minutes_, thus generating a lot of traffic on nessus.org, whereas it's >not necessary. [snip] >If you use a cronjob, you can safely set it to fetch the new plugins every >two hours, that should be more than sufficient. >[snip] >Abusers have been blacklisted, Aside from this just being rude and unnecessary, was there ever a firm conclusion to the question to the repercussions of an update while in the middle of a scan? Personally I make sure never to update while a scan is in process. Don Whiteside, Managing Partner Terminus Security LLC 703-421-9996 http://www.terminus-security.com IMPORTANT NOTICE: This message is intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, you are hereby notified that we do not consent to any reading, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy the transmitted information.
