In the preferences tab under 'Ping the remote host', you can tune the host discovery settings. You could easily extend this scan to perform operating system identification by enabling the appropriate plugins, but be cautioned that this will trigger several more checks and increase your scan time as well as send more invasive scans to each host. This may seem odd at first, but the 'Ping host' checkbox in the first configuration screen will take care of host discovery without any plugins being enabled. Since we are only performing tests to check if a host is alive, scanning more hosts per scan will make the scan run much faster with little impact on the network or local Nessus scanner machine.Īll plugins can be disabled in the plugins section. I've also increased the 'Max checks per host' setting from the default of 40 to 80. In the main policy configuration screen above the only setting in the 'Port scanners' section enabled is 'Ping host', which tells Nessus not to portscan the target hosts but only send packets that will test if the hosts are alive or not. To configure a scan that will only test if hosts are alive, use the following policy settings:

By tuning a scan that only discovers live hosts, you can check that your Nessus server is set up properly, collect a list of hosts to scan and stay within your vulnerability scanning policy guidelines.

Your internal policies may provide specific time windows when vulnerability scanning can occur.

By enumerating these hosts you can include them in the report to show that scans were attempted but did not find any results, then determine if this is normal behavior or not. Hosts that only respond to an ICMP ping will not show up in the default Nessus scan report. Systems protected by a network or host-based firewall may only respond on a single port or to an ICMP echo request. There are a few good reasons to run this type of scan: This is a very low impact scan that does not look for vulnerabilities or enumerate ports.

A Nessus user recently contacted me about performing a scan that would simply discover hosts on the network.

How to use nessus in vmware