Re: [NSE] Target time out checks

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:36:41AM -0700, Patrick Donnelly wrote:
> Currently NSE starts the time out clock for all the hosts in a
> runlevel group before beginning the scan. If there is an extremely
> large group, some hosts may not be handled before a script thread is
> mistakenly timed out (even when it has no connections open). Also, a
> script may not actually be accessing that host at the time (whois.nse
> will query the whois databse, not the target!!). For this reason, I do
> not believe that the Target.timedOut method is appropriate for the
> Script Engine. However, the target.startTimeOutClock and
> target.stopTimeOutClock methods are still useful for tracking the
> length of time the host was scanned (even if indirectly).

One problem could be that script_scan processes all the targets in the
current host group. As you say, most of the hosts in the group will not
be undergoing active scanning at any given time because of the socket
limit. How about reducing the number of hosts that are script scanned at
once? The function osscan_2 in osscan2.cc is a wrapper around the real
OS scan function os_scan_2. osscan_2 breaks the host group into smaller
chunks for processing.

David Fifield

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