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  • SAINT Home

  • Getting started


    What you need to do to run SAINT

    1. Run `perl reconifg`.
    2. Run `make`.
    3. Edit config/saint.cf (if you want)
    and POOF, you're done. Next just type ./saint to run SAINT using the HTML interface. If you want to run it from the command line, type saint -h and look at the options.

    Remember - you should run SAINT as "root"!

    After the probe is done, you can then go into the HTML interface (again, just type saint), go to the SAINT Reporting & Data Analysis section. Look at the Vulnerabilities section first, then examine the other methods (Information and Trust).

    One important caveat!

    Remember, if you have the tcpd wrappers or some other mechanism that does a reverse finger, turn off that feature before running SAINT! There is a reasonable chance that someone else out on the network will have the same feature turned on, and you do NOT want to enter into a "finger war" or infinite loop of fingers going back and forth between you and your targets, each of you slowly getting buried in mail and/or logs. Make sure to turn it back on after finishing the data collection, of course!

    Getting and compiling all those programs if you don't have them already

    You'll need Perl version 5.00 or above (see system requirements) as well as a C compiler to get SAINT running properly. To compile and prepare SAINT, look at the first section of the SAINT tutorial.

    What are all the files for?

    SAINT creates and uses quite a few files, but a user typically only has to really be concerned with one - the configuration file, (config/saint.cf.) Besides the program files that actually run SAINT, the following files are read or generated by SAINT:
    1. bin/* These are the programs that SAINT depends on for data acquisition.
    2. config/* Configuration files that SAINT need to find other programs, and for default settings.
    3. html/*. All of these files are either html pages or perl programs to generate the pages for the user interface.
    4. perl/* Code modules used by either SAINT or by the data acquisition tools.
    5. results/database-name. SAINT databases. Each database is made up of three files:
      1. all-hosts. This is a list of all the hosts that SAINT found out about during the scan, including hosts that it never touched.
      2. facts. This is a list of all the output records emitted by the *.saint tools. These records are what gets processed by SAINT to generate the reports.
      3. todo. This lists all the hosts and probes that SAINT actually ran against the hosts. With this table, SAINT knows what probes it can skip when you scan the hosts again.
    6. rules/*. The rules that SAINT uses to assess the situation and infer facts from the existing information. Extremely flexible (simply perl code that is interpreted), this is one of the most powerful features of SAINT. See the rules section for more.
    7. src/* The source code to some of the SAINT support programs.

    Back to the Introductory TOC/Index