Mailing List Archive

Jan-Oliver Wagner said:

> I got some feedback that it might be nice to
> separate the subnet and host selection from Report NG
> and add it to the left hand treelist widget as
> sub-elements of a report.

> This way Report NG would loose some flexibility
> so i am really reluctant to think more about such
> a change.
> Unless the message is that actually noone uses this
> flexibility (ie. to start with Severity or Port).

As a user I can say that I often start the sort by severity or port.

However the subnet seems all but useless for many uses. However, (and I've
mentioned this on the list before) one way to improve it quite a bit would
be to have a button to select whether the subnet field is populated with
the subnet number or a user-supplied string (such as "servers" or something).
I already have this hardcoded in my copy's source code, and then if I want
to take a couple of scans, put different names in each, and then cat the
nbe files together, the subnet selector allows me to look at several different
groups (i.e. servers, desktops, routers, or maybe something like windows,
linux, unix, or whatever).

Other than the code complaining about "Garbage in the Conditions" it works
perfectly well.

Hope this helps.

On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:17:33PM -0800, Don Kitchen wrote:
> However the subnet seems all but useless for many uses.

Absolutely. However, we had problems in the past of users scanning a
moderately large subnet with the GUI and having the GUI only display
the N (with N =~ several hundreds) first hosts due to limitations in
GTK. So the subnet part was here to make that no list is longer than
255 hosts.

Since in Nessus 2.4 we'll be GTK2 based, it might be interesting to see
if improvements have been made on the GTK side to handle huge lists. If
it handles them well, then we can get rid of the subnet view or use it
to do something else (like categorizing the hosts, as you suggested).


-- Renaud

Hi,

> Absolutely. However, we had problems in the past of users scanning a
> moderately large subnet with the GUI and having the GUI only display
> the N (with N =~ several hundreds) first hosts due to limitations in
> GTK. So the subnet part was here to make that no list is longer than
> 255 hosts.
>
> Since in Nessus 2.4 we'll be GTK2 based, it might be interesting to see
> if improvements have been made on the GTK side to handle huge lists. If
> it handles them well, then we can get rid of the subnet view or use it
> to do something else (like categorizing the hosts, as you suggested).>

I don't see any limitation using Gtk treeview/listview's. For example,
evolution uses huge lists to store mail and you can index thousand of
lists. But I think there will have to make some tests with the new nessus
GUI.

IIRC, nessus 2.2 currently uses a Gtk+ 2.X GUI, no? At least you can
compile with Gtk+2 support.

Is planned more nessus frontends in a future? I was thinking about porting
the UI using Qt/kdelibs, but currently I don't know how splitted is the
view from the model/controller and if I have to know how it works the full
application.

Best regards,
Alejandro

* Renaud Deraison <deraison@nessus.org> [20041130 16:35]:
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:17:33PM -0800, Don Kitchen wrote:
> > However the subnet seems all but useless for many uses.
>
> Absolutely. However, we had problems in the past of users scanning a
> moderately large subnet with the GUI and having the GUI only display
> the N (with N =~ several hundreds) first hosts due to limitations in
> GTK. So the subnet part was here to make that no list is longer than
> 255 hosts.
>
> Since in Nessus 2.4 we'll be GTK2 based, it might be interesting to see
> if improvements have been made on the GTK side to handle huge lists. If
> it handles them well, then we can get rid of the subnet view or use it
> to do something else (like categorizing the hosts, as you suggested).

I've only put the report text in a GtkTextBuffer+GtkTextView, but
didn't touch the other lists. But as we're using GTK2 now, of course
they can be replaced with GtkListView (+Model, +Store).

To categorize different hosts you can use scopes now. With my last
two patches for nessusd to this list you can use user rules to
exclude servers from a subnet scan, so they don't appear in the
workstation scope.

Thomas

--
Email: thomas@intevation.de
http://intevation.de/~thomas/