-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KNOWLEDGE BASE SAVING
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


	Starting with Nessus 1.0.5, the experimentatal "kb saving" feature
has been added.

Why experimental ?
------------------

	This feature is declared as being experimental because it has not
been tested by many persons, and its behavior may radically change between
two releases. This feature will not be considered as being experimental
at the next major release of Nessus (1.2)


What is the "knowledge base" ?
------------------------------

	Each time a host is tested, a lot of information about it is gathered:
the list of open ports, the login/password used to connect to it via SMB,
the list of the FTP directories that are writeable, and so on...

This list used to stay in memory and was shared among all the security checks
which may contribute to it. Its role is to make the writing of a plugin easier
and to prevent redundancy between two tests. 

The problem was that after a test was done, this list would be lost.

What is this feature about ?
----------------------------

	This feature saves the content of the knowledge base built for each
host on the disk, on the server (nessusd) side.

What is the purpose of saving the knowledge base ?
--------------------------------------------------

	As the KB is regenerated during each test, saving it on disk may
seem useless. However, it may speed up the tests. For instance, once the
list of open ports of a target is known and written on disk, it's possible
to restart a test without having to do a port scan again. This save bandwidth
and time, and makes the test of new security checks faster.


But it's dangerous ! What if the configuration of the remote host changes 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
between two tests ?
-------------------

Once it has been saved on disk, the knowledge base is given a date. It's
up to you to configure nessusd to consider a knowledge base as being
obsolete after two years, ten minutes, or two seconds.


How do I use it ?
-----------------

See http://www.nessus.org/doc/kb_saving.html


$Id: kb_saving.txt,v 1.3 2000/08/27 21:40:25 renaud Exp $
