Re: NESSUS

["Brian K. Dore'" <bkd () LOUISIANA EDU>]

The XP SP2 (and 2003 SP1) firewalls are configurable by group policy and
it's easy to set up port/ip exceptions for a particular machine/subnet.  For
unmanaged (student) machines with the firewall you still are going to want
to look for open ports/exposed services (especially since things like
sharing a folder will expose 135-139 and 445 to the local subnet.) And of
course they can turn it off.  If you are just trying to find out how many
machines are out there, firewalled machines still respond to ARP requests.  

As far as cost/benefit, it depends what you are scanning for and what you
expect to learn from it.    

Brian  

> For the folks who are using a solution like this, can you 
> tell me how Service Pack 2 has affected its usability?  
> Common sense would say that a host-based firewall turned on 
> by default on 80% of my desktop machines would make any 
> significant purchases in desktop scanning sw/hw a waste.

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