I’ve just finished writing some new Nessus plugins, taking my NASL count to over 100 now.

Just as I finished checking them into Git, Tenable decided to renumber the plugin ranges. Custom NASL’s were always given a range around 50000-53000, but now Tenable are up to 50321 themselves, so have decided on a new set of ranges:

Passive: 1 – 10,000
Active: 10,001 – 900,000
Custom: 900,001 – 999,999
Compliance: 1,000,000+

I’ve made some changes to my backup regime too, from now on I’m backing up my whole $HOME directory using BackInTime to an encrypted drive, rather than encrypting a tarball. This saves space as BIT uses rsync and hard links to create incremental backups. The old tar+gpg method would create a 3Gb file per backup, with BIT I’ve got 11 incremental backups totalling 9Gb.

Decrypting, decompressing and unpacking a 3.5Gb tarball to get to perhaps one file inside it is painfully slow, with BIT I can instantly restore (or just view or copy) a file at any date.

As it uses rsync as a backend its also simple to run from cron, which you can’t really do with GnuPG as you need to enter your passphrase.

I was thinking of using Deja Dup as its nicely integrated into Nautilus in Fedora/Ubuntu but its GUI is pretty minimal – literally a button or menu item for backup/restore/revert, and I’m not keen on the backend or limited use of GnuPG (passwords not keys, and no password input checking).