Nmap Development: Performance Tuning NMAP

[Bill Petersen <bill.petersen () alcatel com>]

Hello,
A project I am working on will require me to scan over 1 million IPs 
monthly (yes, all owned by my company). I have acquired a dual Xeon 3GHz 
system with 4GB of RAM for the job.  I plan to turn on -sV and -O to get 
version and OS information in addition to 'is the machine up' and 
general port information. It will be running Fedora Core 3.
My questions are:
1. How would you tune this system for the task?
2. What options would you turn on / off at compile time?
3. How would you tune nmap at run time for the task?

In the past, threads within nmap have not helped me much.  I have 
actually used a perl script to help me maximize the throughput by 
running up to 190 concurrent nmaps (on a similarly configured machine).  
I'd like to get away from that and have nmap take over the task.  Any 
suggestions?
Thanks for your input.

Regards,
Bill

--

Bill Petersen, CISSP
Senior Information Security Analyst
North American Information Security Group
Alcatel USA, Plano, Texas
972-519-4249 Voice
972-519-4830 FAX
Bill.Petersen () alcatel com

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