Re: [RFC] Basing timeouts in NSE on host.times.timeout

[Patrick Donnelly <batrick () batbytes com>]

Hi Daniel,

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Daniel Miller <bonsaiviking () gmail com> wrote:
> List,
>
> Right now, there are several sources of default timeouts on socket
> operations within NSE:
>
> * A socket created by nmap.new_socket() has a timeout of 30 seconds
> * The sockets used in the comm.lua library have 8-second timeouts
> * of all the calls to set_timeout, a plurality (44%) are 5 seconds, with
> the remaining 56% evenly split between 10 seconds and other times (ranging
> from 10ms to 50s)
>
> In a large number of these cases (portrule and hostrule scripts), the
> socket is intended to communicate with a port on a host for which Nmap
> already has a timeout calculated, reported via the host.times.timeout
> variable. It seems to me like a lot of these timeouts could be replaced
> with:
>
> --was: socket:set_timeout(8000)
> socket:set_timeout(((host.times and host.times.timeout) or 8) * 1000)
>
> Obviously this would not work for prerule, postrule, or external scripts.
> But I think it's probably a huge improvement over the default 30-second
> timeout!
>
> Does anyone have thoughts or concerns regarding this approach?

I really like the idea. My only concern is that perhaps
host.times.timeout may be too exact and perhaps we should add a few
seconds? Or does it already include some wiggle-room?

-- 
Patrick Donnelly
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