RE: How to cancel a script scan

["Rob Nicholls" <robert () robnicholls co uk>]

Although I hadn't been thinking about that specifically, it definitely
sounds like something that should be taken into consideration. If NSE script
prescanning adds hosts at the start of the scan, for example, how does
--resume know to add them again if it tries to resume halfway through a scan
(as I presume, but haven't tested yet, that it won't redo the prescanning
and effectively forgets about any new targets that were added by NSE)?

If we had some sort of queue system that meant Nmap was always scanning X
number of hosts (each time a host is complete it starts scanning the next),
we could simply add hosts to the queue if they're not in the completed or
current list of hosts. We could leave it to Nmap to internally remove
duplicate hosts (or scripts), when letting NSE scripts add hosts to the
scan.

This might also help us improve one of the workarounds, where multiple FQDNs
that resolve to the same IP will (IIRC) be port scanned repeatedly in
separate host groups (as we lost some port scan results when in the same
host group), when perhaps all we really want is to grab the existing port
scan results for that IP and then run, for example, service and/or NSE
scripts to capture information from a different virtual host (I imagine this
could get tricky if we're running things like SMB scripts against the same
host as we will duplicate tests unless we somehow mark scripts as being per
IP or per host name, and should the results be duplicated/reported for each
hostname? I'd suggest it'd be much easier to duplicate the output, at least
initially).

Rob
 
-----Original Message-----
From: nmap-dev-bounces () insecure org [mailto:nmap-dev-bounces () insecure org]
On Behalf Of Toni Ruottu
Sent: 03 April 2011 23:24
To: Rob Nicholls
Cc: nmap-dev () insecure org; Ron
Subject: Re: How to cancel a script scan

Would this be at all related to the the "scan playlist" feature we were
discussing earlier. The idea was that nmap would have a list of pending so a
script could add scans to the queue, in addition to adding targets to the
ongoing scan. The details about this are in the air. No one knows have one
should avoid adding duplicate scans into the queue and how or if one should
aggregate scan results. I just thought I'd bring it up, as you are
discussing resume, and I think that is another type of scanning management
thing.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 12:01 AM, Rob Nicholls <robert () robnicholls co uk>
wrote:
> I suspect we could make some major improvements to the hostgroup and 
> resume features, and it could make a good (if not slightly "boring" 
> compared to things like improving IPv6 support) GSoC project.
>
> Even with things like --defeat-rst-ratelimit, a single host can tie up 
> a long scan and prevent the next scanning phase, or next hostgroup, 
> from being launched. Not being able to --resume just those remaining 
> hosts, never mind resuming where it had left off, is quite annoying as 
> you have to scan the entire hostgroup again (which is why I pretty 
> much never use --resume, I try to manually time scans to complete by a 
> certain time, even if it means manually merging XML data together). It 
> might be useful if the hostgroup can move onto the service scans and 
> NSE scripts while the final hosts are still undergoing their original
portscans.
> Those slow hosts can prevent the output from being written, and even 
> if you check the verbose output for the discovered ports, you won't 
> end up with XML output, which I find far more useful nowadays. It'd be 
> nice if we could somehow resume scans from and still generate the XML 
> files - I know there are issues, but what are they and can we work around
them?
> I'm aware that it could affect the grepable output and potentially 
> break (poorly written) scripts that people have written that assume, 
> for example, that completed IPs will match the input list order or range
(e.g.
> 192.168.0.1-4 could produce scan results for .3, .2, .4 and finally .1).
>
> Rob
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nmap-dev-bounces () insecure org 
> [mailto:nmap-dev-bounces () insecure org]
> On Behalf Of Ron
> Sent: 03 April 2011 21:17
> To: nmap-dev () insecure org
> Subject: Re: How to cancel a script scan
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:35:30 +0100 Houcem HACHICHA 
> <houcem.hachicha () gmail com> wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > Is there a way to cancel an undergoing script scan? (without losing 
> > the portscan results of course)
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> There's a secret way: pull out your network cable.
>
> It doesn't work for every script, but in most cases it'll cause the 
> script scan to fail quickly.
>
> Something that Nmap really ought to have, and maybe we should add it 
> to the TODO list if it isn't already there, is the ability to display 
> the "output so far" when you kill nmap with ctrl-c. That way, if you 
> have to kill a scan half-way through, you don't lose all the data you've
already accumulated.
> One step further would be to add a feature like Hydra or John has, 
> where it'll save its progress to a file and can resume from where it left
off.
> That'd be super awesome, but I'm not sure if it's possible.
>
> Ron
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAk2Y1aUACgkQ2t2zxlt4g/SWoACeN8fUliIzHpc2LD9hxopYtgSb
> XkEAoL47rEGWPO2vcTrtJWi9Fl7zXkrL
> =p9ar
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list 
> http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
> Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list 
> http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
> Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/


_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/