Feature requests? Bugs? Annoyances?

[hdm at metasploit.com (H D Moore)]

On Monday 24 September 2007 03:36, Rohit Srivastwa wrote:
> a) Auto-update: At least a way to enable that.

On Windows, you can create a batch script which will perform an 
auto-update. Then you can use the Windows Task Scheduler to run this. 
Make sure the user under which it runs has write access to the tree. Take 
a look at the existing msfupdate.bat script that comes with the 3.0 
installer for pointers. Key points are adding svn.exe to your path and 
setting --svn-config to point to the saved configuration directory 
(contains the cached SSL cert of our server).

> b) Msfconsole: A pure shell prompt so that invoking msfweb can be
> avoided, its slow :(

A true msfconsole on Windows is going to be a challenge:

1) Windows STDIO blocks on select/poll and only returns when the enter key 
has been hit. You can use the Win32 api to set the terminal into cooked 
mode and use another API to poll it, but its a hack at best, and leads us 
to the next problem:

2) Even if you can STDIO working properly (creating a pair of TCP sockets 
that are fed by a custom poller of the STDIO handles), the Readline 
library will only use the real STDIO handles and block anyways. We did 
find a combination of libreadline + Ruby that didn't block, but it spun 
at 100% CPU instead.

3) The Windows console just sucks. I played with different options for 
modes, sizes, and fonts, but in the end, there was no good solution using 
the standard Windows console.

To solve these issues, we need a Win32 ninja to code up a custom console 
application and create a Readline style interface that we can use from 
inside Metasploit. If anyone wants to hack on this, drop me an email.

-HD