Multi-platform Interrogation and Reporting with Rscan

This paper describes Rscan - a tool that allows a System Administrator to easily write and execute scripts on a single machine or an entire network of machines. Rscan can be used to automate security checks, configuration checks and many other tasks. If a module (a collection of scripts) is written with different sections for different operating systems and different versions of each operating system (as they are intended to be written), Rscan will automatically select the correct set of scripts to execute on any particular operating system. As Rscan runs it generates reports which can be written as either plain ASCII or H( bytes) ( bytes) TML files. Rscan is specifically designed to be run in a heterogeneous environment and is easily adapted to new and different operating systems. Two running modes are available: text mode and GUI mode. When running in text mode, all output that is generated is sent to either standard out or standard error. When running in GUI mode, Rscan starts a WWW browser such as Netscape Navigator or NCSA Mosaic and the user can configure the system, run scans and read reports using the browser as a GUI.