Today I have been mostly installing Junos. Well actually I’ve wasted most of the day trying to get Junos 10.4 to work in Olive under VirtualBox. I understood that it required FreeBSD 7.1, so tried installing it under 7.1 and 7.4 to no avail.

In the end I cloned my Junos 9.0/FreeBSD 4.11 VM, allocated 512Mb instead of 256Mb and installed 10.4 as an upgrade, which also meant I didn’t have to bother removing checkpic.

I wasted a few rounds of installing due to using the export version, which doesn’t include SSH! Also part of the trick of getting it to work under VBox seemed to be to create a serial port as a named pipe – not sure why but that seemed to help get past the bootloader hanging, possibly as it had a TTY to allocate.

I also upgraded my 9.0 to 9.6 which has a bit of a more useful JWeb interface, and also requires 512Mb now.

All of this was to aide my development of a set of NASL scripts to do Junos security compliance auditing. It seems Tenable have worked around the UNIX-only limitation of Nessus' ssh_cmd() function by putting in a special check for when uname -a fails – i.e. its either IOS or Junos (or unsupported). Of course in Junos shell mode, it will pass (as its FreeBSD) so you have to check that you’re in CLI mode to do the config checking.

Its only taken them four years of me asking for this, and I guess its come as a result of Nessus’s new IOS support for their own compliance plugin and local security checks for Junos patches etc.

Update: I’ve written 20 NASL plugins to do the Junos auditing now and I noticed I was hitting the SSH rate-limit setting in Junos, so my plugins were getting booted off. It was because for each plugin I was calling ssh_cmd() at least once and also a function that checks I could login with the correct level/privileges etc; so was making at least two SSH connection attempts per plugin, which soon hit the 10 connection attempts per minute limit that was configured.

So now I’ve moved all of my ssh_cmd() calls into one big include file which uses a single SSH connection to send 30 or so commands, and populates the knowledgebase with the results. The plugins then have that in their script_dependencies() and don’t use SSH at all, just a couple of calls to get_kb_item() which simplifies the code quite a lot and an entire scan can be done in 10secs!