nessus The plugins that have the ability to crash remote services or hosts.
 

this plugins in nessus have been deactivated by default. how do i enable them so that i can carry out an indepth scan. om am running opensuse 10.2 and the latest nessus via the command line. the client is not working. that will be the next question.

Have you tried the nessus site?

Well, I don't use Nessus 3, but the older Nessus 2, which still is free software, and not just freeware, and is available in the Fedora-repos.

But, long talk short, I found that /etc/nessus/nessusd.conf (your location might be different, probably somewhere under /opt) holds the setting safe_checks = yes, which, when set to no should do what you are looking for.