Re: Running Nmap several times within the same process

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 06:53:25AM +0000, Andy Woods wrote:
> I'm playing around with a project where I want to run Nmap several times
> within the same process.
> Currently I'm doing some tests to see if it is possible, or really just a
> bad idea.
>
> To make some kind of proof-of-concept I renamed the entry-function main(..)
> in main.cc to main_entry(..),
> and created a new main(..) function with the following code;
>
> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
>     printf("Starting first scan...\n
>     printf("----------------------\n");
>     main_entry(argc, argv);
>
>     printf("\n");
>     printf("Starting second scan...\n");
>     printf("-------------------------\n");
>     main_entry(argc, argv);
>     return 0;
> }
>
> The idea is to run two scans in the same process, which I think requires
> Nmap to clean up
> global memory allocations in the first run to turn out well.
>
> 1. TEST (standard arguments)
> =================================================================
> In this test I passed standard arguments to Nmap, but as you can see
> of the results the second scan fails (probably because some global
> variables,
> or heap allocated pointers are not deleted)
>
> C:\Src\NmapTest\nmap-5.00\mswin32\Debug>nmap.exe -n 192.168.119.1
> Starting first scan...
> ----------------------
>
> Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-09-23 07:57 Central Europe
> Standard Time
> Interesting ports on 192.168.119.1:
> Not shown: 995 closed ports
> PORT      STATE SERVICE
> 135/tcp   open  msrpc
> 139/tcp   open  netbios-ssn
> 445/tcp   open  microsoft-ds
> 912/tcp   open  unknown
> 12345/tcp open  netbus
> MAC Address: 00:50:aa:bb:cc:dd (VMWare)
>
> Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 5.16 seconds
>
> Starting second scan..
> ----------------------
>
> Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-09-23 07:58 Central Europe
> Standard Time
> PortList::initializePortMap: portmap for protocol 6 already initialized
> QUITTING!

This is probably related to the problem reported at
http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2009/q2/0464.html, where running two scans
in a row using the --interactive option would cause an assertion
failure. I agree, it looks like some state isn't being reset or
initialized properly, but I haven't found out where it is.

This is something that should work. It would be helpful if you can find
what changes are needed to make it work.

David Fifield

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