Nmap Development mailing list archives
Potential SoC Idea
From: doug () hcsw org
Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 18:23:20 -0700
Hi nmap-dev/SoC! I'm working on a pretty large patchset that I hope to release to the list sometime this evening but I just thought of an extremely useful medium difficulty SoC project. Nmap comes with a number of "database" files that contain all sorts of information from service/protocol names to OS signatures. Sometimes it is useful, especially during development, to modify and test these files. In my opinion the current interface for specifying custom files is a bit clunky: create a new directory, copy in all the data files you need for your scans, then pass that directory to Nmap with the --datadir switch or the NMAPDIR environment variable. This is sometimes inconvenient and also has its limitations. The biggest of which is you need to have a separate directory for each combination of data files required. Also inconvenient is that all data files must be named by their exact name "nmap-whatever", leaving you only their location on the file system for documentation and requiring a separate directory to document each combination of files with copies of or symlinks to all the other data files you need. An obvious solution is to have a special switch for each data file so you can "override" the exact location of a given data file but continue using data files in the default location. Something like: nmap --nmap-services-location /path/to/nmapdir ... But creating a switch for each file introduces lots of maintenance and documentation issues. Can we do better? A possible medium-difficulty SoC task idea that anybody is free to take over is to make a switch that "overrides" the location of any particular nmap data file. Something like this: nmap --datafile-override nmap-services=/path/to/it \ --datafile-override nmap-protocols=/somewhere/else ... Most (all?) of nmap's data files are opened through the following function in nmap.cc: int nmap_fetchfile(char *filename_returned, int bufferlen, char *file); This function might be the best place to perform the "override". Best, Doug
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- Potential SoC Idea doug (May 15)