Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Umit 0.9.1-RC1

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 07:15:30PM -0300, Adriano Monteiro wrote:
> Hi all! I'm pleased to announce the Umit 0.9.1 Release Candidate 1. As
> usual, This release features some bug fixes and usability and
> performance improvements.

Hi Adriano.  I'm glad to see the new release!  And judging from the
SourceForge download statistics, I'm not the only one.  Each release
seems to get more and more downloads.  My comments are in this
message, and I hope other people will try it and send their comments
too.

I also think UMIT is ready to move beyond the -dev list.  Feel free to
send an announcement for this or the next version to the 40,000
nmap-hackers.

UMIT is also a lot better than NmapFE at this point, IMHO.  It is
cross-platform, is actively developed, uses the stable Nmap XML
format, and has a powerful search interface.  You can't say any of
that about NmapFE.  I think we should try to get this distributed with
the next stable version of Nmap, which is probably two or three months
away.  I hope that version will also contain NSE and the new OS
detection system with a comprehensive database.

So I went to the download page and was confronted by choices such as
'Umit-0.9.1-RC1.exe' and 'umit-0.9.1.tar.bz2'.  Is "0.9.1-RC1" the
same as "0.9.1"?  The files were all uploaded on September 1, but the
name is different and I encountered different behavior between them
(particularly in tab naming, tab closing, and tab scrolling when you
have many tabs).  But that could possibly just be based on Linux
vs. Windows platform differences.

Anyway, I started with the Windows version.  The first thing I noticed
is that the size has been reduced more than 50% from 18MB to less than
8MB.  Much better!  Also, the installer was smooth and didn't require
explicit installation of half a dozen dependencies.  I think shipping
with a compiled EXE like you are doing now is the way to go.

I notice that you are shipping with the latest stable Nmap (4.11),
which makes sense.

You may recall that with the last version, I tried to run it and
nothing happened.  I only discovered later that it just took a long
time to start and I didn't wait long enough.  This time I'm happy to
reported that it started in just a few seconds.

Once it started, I tried Help -> About and nothing happened.  Help ->
Help only gave me a dialogue saying that help hasn't been implemented.

I like the way you can now select through the "Nmap output" screen and
you click the "Services" button on the left to view just hosts with a
certain service available, that feature doesn't seem to work on the
"Nmap output" pane.  Maybe you should either make it work (show just
Nmap output related to systems with the given port available), or
simply change to a different pane such as "Ports/Hosts" when someone
clicks "Services".

Speaking of the services button, it seems to show all services found
in any state as long as the port was listed on the "Interesting ports"
line.  I suppose it is a judgement call, but you may want to consider
only showing open or open|filtered ports.  Otherwise you get a bunch
of entries for services which are only closed, and even then it only
shows cases where the closed port was listed specifically as opposed
to the many cases where the port might be closed but was grouped
together in "Not shown: 1670 closed ports".

We should probably do some branstorming on nmap-dev as to what the
default profile should be and which ones should be included by
default.  I also really like that it is so easy to add new ones.

I tried to load a big scan created with Nmap by using the "Open Scan"
option and selecting the XML file.  Unfortuantely it appears that only
the "UMIT Scan Results" (.umr) type can be loaded.  I suppose one
issue is that the .xml doesn't include the normal-style Nmap output
which you load into the "Nmap output" tab.  Is there anything else
preventing you from loading normal XML output?

I then gave the UNIX version a try.  I downloaded umit-0.9.1.tar.bz2
onto my Fedora Core 5 Linux box.  I saw that the README now contains
instructions for installing UMIT in a non-default directory.  That was
great since it allowed me to install it as non-privileged user
'fyodor' under /home/fyodor/umit.  Worked like a charm.

In Windows (but not Linux), I encountered a minor bug related to
opening numerous tabs.  When I opened enough tabs to fill up all the
horizontal window space, the scrolling/placement didn't always work
correctly.  I used this to try the "Help -> Report a Bug" feature.  It
gave me a "Could not open default Web Browser" error, but the bug
apparently got filed anyway on the SF tracker.  Also, the "Report a
Bug" option only appeared on Windows, not Linux.

So in conclusion, you are making great progress.  Keep up the good
work!

Cheers,
Fyodor

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