Lab 1 - Installing Nessus

Download the SlackwareBasic Virtual PC image that I made for cs216:

http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~mdanfor/cs216/vm.html

You'll need to install X11 on that. The fastest link seems to be ftp.scarlet.be/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/slackware/x/x11-6.8.2-i486-3.tgz

Once downloaded, do 'installpkg x11-6.8.2-i486-3' as root.

Now extract all the nessus archives, tar xvzf <filename>

For each directory, you will do the steps ./configure, make, make install, but you need to do each directory in the following order:

nessus-libraries
libnasl
nessus-core
nessus-plugins

You may need to run 'ldconfig' after installing nessus-libraries and libnasl to update the shared library cache.

You can also try this order on your Linux distribution of choice, just make sure they have X11 installed as nessus-core builds both the server and the Linux X11 client.

After you have Nessus compiled and installed, you need to do nessus-adduser to create a user account and nessus-mkcert to make a certificate for the server. You can then start the daemon, which should be /usr/local/sbin/nessusd

When running scans, run them against your own machine or machines in the lab and leave the default option to only run safe checks enabled. The scan usually takes 5-10 minutes per machine. When it is done, the Linux client pops up a report.