Nessus

There are a great many commercial network security scanners on the market. McAfee FoundStone, HfNetCheck, Retina, and probably scads of others. The problem with this is the word “commercial”. Commercial means “takes money”. Well, scanning with Nessus would be a good way to save money, right?

Let me take you though my journey trying to get Nessus setup and configured for automated scanning and then you can decide. Remember, I’m not an Open Source kinda guy, in general. I don’t have anything against it–I just usually don’t have the time for it. I need solutions that I can implement fast and that can provide value immediately. Which does not describe open source for the most part. (Let me take a moment and address the open source community: Sorry guys–that is my opinion, and flaming will only entrench those feelings further. I’d love to use more free software in the enterprise–honestly! But it all comes down to time and real costs.)

At the end of the day, after some serious challenges, what I ended up with was pretty slick. And more importantly, I believe it will end a major source of on-going pain.

Anyway, let’s get crack-a-lackin’.

Next:  Requirements