SATAN Troubleshooting
Symptoms and questions (you might look at the
FAQ for more questions/answers.)
SATAN crashed, hung, or did very odd things to a system
that it was run against.
We've received reports of various OS's that seem to have significant
trouble with SATAN scans, particularily the UDP and TCP scans that span
lots of ports. Among the afflicted:
- DEC Alphas running OSF/1 1.3 - generates a kernal memory fault when
the UDP scan is done, rolls over and dies. The file system is sufficiently
hosed such that the system remains in single user mode upon reboot.
- A few Mac's had ethernet problems, spewing packets back at the
SATAN machine when fping-ed, causing the SATAN host to slow down
tremendously trying to handle the traffic.
- OS/2, version 3.0 of the networking code. A report that it
locked up the telnet and ftp daemons. A restart of inetd is required
to get things going again.
- Ultrix systems running 4.2A - the elcsd process start
to loop, consuming all available CPU cycles.
- SunOS 5.4 - an extra inetd process is forked off, adding 1.0 to
the system load.
I ran SATAN to analyze my results and the
machine slows grinds down to a standstill (and possibly crashes), but I
don't get any answers.
It could be, with a large amount of data, that SATAN is using too much
memory to fit in your machine. An enormous amount of memory is
consumed by the program (see
Given that Satan starts its own http server
on the local host, why doesn't it use 'localhost' instead of the FQDN
of the local host when trying to contact it?
This breaks some HTML browsers. Try running with $dont_use_dns (found
in config/satan.cf) when your naming service is crippled.
Whenever I click on a hyper link it doesn't work.
Be careful if you use proxy services (typically if you're behind a
firewall you do) to access the WWW - you should unset your file environment
variables (such as $http_proxy $file_proxy, $socks_ns, etc.) and/or
change your browser's configuration to not use your SOCKS host or HTTP
Proxy host (in your HTML browser's option section.)
I'm trying to get SATAN running on my Linux box.
Linux is far from a standard Un*x, and SATAN has a tendency to push the
OS and perl to the limits. We've tried to do as much as possible to
make it work, but there are probably various problems we haven't found
because we don't have a Linux box to play with. (Cross?) posting to
comp.security.unix and comp.os.linux.* could probably give you more
help than we could.
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