I'm about three quarters of my way through the course material now but I'm just about to run out of labtime so will have to extend. I am hoping to schedule the exam for the end of January.
One of the modules I have been working on includes a section on auxiliary modules within the Metasploit framework. This includes (amongst many other things) a lot of scanning utilities that I had previously used other tools for - TCP SYN, ACK, NBT, SMTP, SNMP and ARP scanning to name a few. My initial reaction to this was "why would you use anything else?". If MSF can do scanning, service enumeration, and exploitation why bother with the other tools.
After a bit of testing however I found a lot of these modules to be unreliable. Particularly the TCP scanning tools. They seem to crash quite regularly with memory errors if you are scanning multiple hosts. Think I might stick with Nmap in future.
EDIT: Just discovered Unicornscan. Unicornscan has its own dedicated TCP/IP stack so is very fast. It has saved me a lot of time when scanning multiple hosts in the labs.
