Nessus

Nessus is a proprietary vulnerability scanner available free of charge for personal use. There are over 40,000 plugins covering a large range of both local and remote flaws.

Installation

Download and extract the nessus^AUR tarball available in the AUR.

Go to http://tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-download-agreement, agree to the license, and download the package:

• 32-bit: Nessus-5.0.2-fc16.i386.rpm
• 64-bit: Nessus-5.0.2-fc16.x86_64.rpm

Move the RPM file into the nessus directory (i.e. the directory you extracted the tarball's contents to).

Then, build and install the package as usual.

Post-installation setup

Create an SSL certificate for the Nessus web interface:

# /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-mkcert

Register your email at http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-plugins/obtain-an-activation-code and wait for your key to be emailed to you. Then, download all the plugins from the feed with:

# /opt/nessus/bin/nessus-fetch --register <your key here>

Note: If you are behind a proxy, you need to modify /opt/nessus/etc/nessus/nessus-fetch.rc.

Create a Nessus admin user (unrelated to Unix-style users):

# /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-adduser

Usage

The nessus^AUR package provides a nessusd.service unit file, see systemd for details.

Access the web interface at https://localhost:8834 and/or use the commandline interface (/opt/nessus/bin/nessuscmd). In most browsers, you will need to manually accept the SSL certificate you created for the server.

Removal

The package can be removed with pacman, but files created by Nessus, such as the plugin database it downloads, must be removed manually:

Note: This will delete your Nessus configuration files.

# rm -r /opt/nessus