That section provides very little useful information. It doesn’t say what the fields in the dialog boxes are, if there is a specific format needed for the name (they all appear to be of the form “default:unnamed”), the filter example “target:server” in Fig 8.15 doesn’t make sense with the filter:
Example: when filtering for tag=target the specific tag must be set. Otherwise, the desired result would not be found. With tag="target=mailserver" the exact tag with the respective value must be set (see Fig. 8.15).
I finally realized that these examples were wrong, and the whole name of the tag needs to be included.
In particular, I wish to exclude a set of hosts from a scan report. I thought tags would do it - tag the hosts to be excluded and filter for hosts not matching the tag. But this does not appear to be possible. Is there a way to do this?
I see there seem to be some limitations to the tag functionality, or at least it they do not function as per the manual description.
Also, I noticed that tags can be used on pages such as the hosts or targets page If you create a tag with a value of mailserver and apply it to a specific host or target, you can use a filter such as:
tag~mailserver
However, this is different than the manual which says tag=mailserver should work. But, I have to apply the ~ rather than =.
Otherwise, I’m not able to filter the results of a scan using a filter such as the one below or other combinations (tried using ~ to no effect).
tag="host=mailserver"
Also, as far as I can glean, the tags NAME is not supposed to factor into the filtering. The tag="host=mailserver" should filter report results for tag type “host” with the value mailsever
I think its worth time to review the source code and find out why this is not working as expected. Also, there is documentation of filter keywords, but it is not comprehensive.