Re: dns_fingerprint.nasl - silent exit after 3 timeouts, why?

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Renaud Deraison wrote:

> > I think the most annoying part of this was the fact the plugin exited
> > silently (and this is a "feature" of many other plugins). I think all
> > those occurences of exit(0) should be replaced with
> > exit("unable to open connection") or exit("too many timeouts") etc.
> > and Nessus should write those messages to its log (and perhaps,
> > optionally, include them in the report).
> 
> We are heading this way thanks to global_settings.inc. I receive too
> many complaints already of "useless output" (like the service banners),
> so adding a message per failing plugin is not an option.

"Not an option" is supposed to mean it won't be available, not even as
an optional feature for people who would like it?

> Besides, in that particular case we _know_ that not everything can be
> fingerprinted reliably. Adding an extra message to emphasize this fact
> is not a good idea.

But it is still a good idea (in general) to make it possible to figure out
why the given plugin failed without having to resort to trial and error.
Detailed error diagnostics helps to find and fix bugs, esp. bugs that are
hard to reproduce (I am afraid quite a lot of plugin failure falls in this
category).

> Yes and no. The plugin you are talking about is a real special case
> because it's UDP and stateless. If you start to highly parallelize TCP
> plugins (80% of the network-based checks), you end up crashing embedded
> devices and old Solaris boxes.

Most TCP plugins do not need to wait for a timeout, do they?


--Pavel Kankovsky aka Peak  [ Boycott Microsoft--http://www.vcnet.com/bms ]
"Resistance is futile. Open your source code and prepare for assimilation."

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