Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE
From: Brandon Enright <bmenrigh () ucsd edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 09:21:25 +0000
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 23:06:50 -0700 or thereabouts "Patrick Donnelly" <batrick.donnelly () gmail com> wrote:
Looking forward to hearing people's thoughts!
I'm pretty positive about your nse-lua branch because of the testing I did with in testing Ron's scripts. Since most of the testing was via private emails I'll reproduce a very abbreviated rundown of my experience with nse-lua here. The back story is that I was testing all of Ron's very complicated SMB scripts and Ron and I were having major trouble tracking down all of the problems. There were a number of features we thought NSE should offer that it didn't -- most importantly stack traces on error. Patrick cooked up up a basic backtrace script for us but it just didn't work in enough situations with the current Nmap branch. Patrick suggested using nse-lua to debug. Personally I wasn't thrilled with combining the testing of a bunch of complicated script with the testing of a all new NSE. My initial tests with nse-lua went pretty bad. There were a few show-stopping bugs that prevented the script engine from running (properly, it would run and do very strange things). nse-lua seemed very broken and I thought it would take a lot of work to fix. The actual issue turned out to be a series of very small, very easy to fix bugs. I was very surprised at the speed at which Patrick was able to locate the bugs, the overall simplicity of the bugs, and the very small patches (generally just one line) that were needed to get nse-lua working. I ended up testing with the current nmap branch and nse-lua in parallel. Invariably though, when Ron and I would run into a strange error, we were able to make nse-lua spit out the right information to help us track it down. We were mostly lost as to how to troubleshoot with the current NSE implementation. I stopped testing Ron's script with the current NSE and switched to nse-lua entirely because it seemed more stable, provided better data, and was easier for Patrick to help us produce useful data. Admittedly, some of the problems with the current NSE implementation have been fixed by properly handling script timeouts. Overall I'm pretty impressed with nse-lua. It seems like good design and it seems to address some of the complexity and limitations of trying to mesh a C++ NSE with Lua scripts. I haven't looked at the code so I can't comment on the overall quality, maintainability, or understandability. I get the impression though that in the long run, nse-lua will be more flexible, fixable, and extensible. Brandon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklkdBwACgkQqaGPzAsl94IB0QCfdHhcZGQxGwg+Dnz7PqAMAwWU RW4AnApN95UqTdXqL3pwsQgRC2rtGCdS =cyYm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev Archived at http://SecLists.Org
Current thread:
- [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE Patrick Donnelly (Jan 06)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE Brandon Enright (Jan 07)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE David Fifield (Jan 15)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review David Fifield (Jan 16)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review Patrick Donnelly (Jan 17)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review Patrick Donnelly (Jan 17)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review David Fifield (Jan 18)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review Patrick Donnelly (Jan 20)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--detailed review Patrick Donnelly (Jan 17)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE Ron (Jan 17)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--chance for deadlock David Fifield (Jan 18)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--chance for deadlock Patrick Donnelly (Jan 20)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE Patrick Donnelly (Jan 20)
- Re: [NSE] A Lua implementation of NSE--chance for deadlock David Fifield (Jan 18)