Re: Memory problem when scanning testrange

[Dieter Van der Stock <dietervds () gmail com>]

@Brandon: Thanks for typing up such a clear reply! It is most helpfull.

@Fyodor: Apoligies that I haven't included that info before :) The machine
in question has only 512K ram, so I'm not expecting much of it. Still, I'm
going to run the test again today or tomorrow, or a couple, and try to keep
an eye on top stats. I'll let the list know when I have gathered a bit more
info.

With regards,

Dieter



2009/5/19 Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>

> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 02:15:00PM +0200, Dieter Van der Stock wrote:
> > While trying to run an Nmap scan against a 10.10.0.0/17 range, the Nmap
> > process is automatically killed because of too much memory usage.
> >
> > In syslog it says (after a whole output dump of memory stuff):
> > kernel: Out of memory: kill process 28648 (bash) score 8319 or a child
> > kernel: Killed process 28662 (nmap)
> >
> > The Nmap command run was:
> > /usr/bin/nmap -T4 -n -p 1-65535 -oX largescan.xml 10.10.0.0/17
> >
> > The version of Nmap being used: Nmap 4.85BETA9
> >
> > Does anyone have any idea what can be done to prevent this?
> > I suppose it's not an everyday-usage scenario of Nmap, but I'm basicly
> > checking out how far I can push it :)
>
> Hi Dieter.  How much RAM do you have on the system?  How much of it is
> free (not used by all the other applications running) before you start
> Nmap?  How much is Nmap using when you look at it in top or the like?
> What does the growth look like?  Does it start out more reasonable and
> then over the hours/days of the scan continue growing more and more?
> Your command is not unreasonable, and we should make sure that Nmap
> does not use an unreasonable amount of memory in that case.  For
> example, we could reduce the default host group size when so many
> ports are being scanned.  Or maybe there is a memory leak we can fix,
> or in-memory structures we can optimize.
>
> Cheers,
> -F

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