# 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 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-5.2.1-fc16.i386.rpm
- 64-bit: Nessus-5.2.1-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 package provides a `nessusd.service` unit file, see systemd#Using units 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

Categories:

- Networking
- Security