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A.P. Lawrence
Contributing Writer
2006-07-10
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I installed and tested SARA on Linux and Mac OS X. It compiled easily and cleanly on both platforms: ./configure;make; sudo make install.
Sara installs in /usr/local/sara. The first thing you need to do (as root) is cd there and run "./add_user". This will prompt for a user name and password that will be used later to authenticate your access to reports.
You then run SARA to scan hosts or networks:
./sara -a4 10.15.8.42
./sara -a4 10.15.8.0/23
The depth of scanning is controlled by the "-a" argument; a4 is the deepest. It only took a few minutes to scan my local network (I only have 6 hosts) at that level. You will probably see messages like
bin/udp_scan: are we talking to a dead host or network?
and it will interfere with communication on your network and possibly even disconnect you from ssh or telnet sessions.
After it completes, you can find text reports in /usr/local/sara/results/sara-data or you can view them in a browser by running "./sara -D" and then connecting to "http://localhost:666".
The web interface can also scan hosts if you edited /usr/local/sara/config/sara.cf and changed "allow_scan" to "1". Other things like the default port and allowed hosts can be changed there, and you can also customize the scanning actions or exclude certain hosts from being scanned. It's all pretty obvious, but the man page is available on-line if you need it.
*Originally published at APLawrence.com
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About the Author:
A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com
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