Creating network baselines with scanPBNJ

When performing a penetration test it is important to know when and what changed over a period of time. Administrators are typically overworked and will probably still need to get work completed while you are doing your testing. One method of ensuring that you are not playing on an ever changing field is to grab a baseline of the network you are testing. PBNJ is very capable of this task. The website for scanPBNJ is located at http://pbnj.sourceforge.net and the tool is also available as part of the BackTrack 5 R1 distribution. The key item of note about scanPBNJ is that it uses Nmap to scan the network and then stores the results in a database for you along with timestamps of when the scan had been performed.

Setting up MySQL for PBNJ

BackTrack comes with MySQL preinstalled. We will take advantage of this and have PBNJ deposit our scan findings into a MySQL database that will prepare.

Starting MySQL

Type the following at the command line:

# service mysql...