Re: ensuring plugins download

[Eric van Straten <icvanstra@yahoo.com>]

All,

Following up to issue below.

Thank you to George for his follow-through/responses to me!

The issue ended up being my not re-registering the product when I had done a prior upgrade. 

Middle of last week I upgraded from 3.0.2 (the version I forgot to register) to 3.0.5.  When reviewing my notes that I had made during the install I saw that I had not registered the new version.  As soon as I did that, the automated updates started working.

Thanks,
eric

----- Original Message ----
From: George A. Theall <theall@tenablesecurity.com>
To: nessus@list.nessus.org
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 4:20:53 PM
Subject: Re: ensuring plugins download

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 11:17:16AM -0800, Eric van Straten wrote:

> 1) where is the best place to find a FAQ or newbie area?  Since I'm
> fairly new to Nessus I would like to look there before asking the list...

There's no FAQ per se, but you can find several whitepapers here:

   http://www.nessus.org/documentation/

Also, the list archives hold a wealth of information, especially if you
have specific questions.

> 2) From the documentation the Plugins should be updating themselves
> every 24 hours

This is true of version 3.x only.

> but how do I verify that it's running and/or actually
> updating?

Look in your process list for something named "nessusd-update"; eg,

   pgrep -fl nessusd-update

You should also be able to trace its activity by searching the
nessusd.messages logfile for messages prefixed by "nessusd-update:". For
example, if updates are working, you'll see messages like these:

   [Thu Feb 22 10:51:41 2007][2522] nessusd-update: Fetching the
     newest plugins from the master server
   [Thu Feb 22 10:51:57 2007][2523] Caught HUP signal - recompiling
     the plugins and restart nessusd
   [Thu Feb 22 10:51:57 2007][2522] nessusd-update: The plugins were
     updated successfully

> What is making me question this is:
> A) in the nessusd.messages it shows every day performing/completing the
> update
> B) the file plugin_feed_info.inc does not appear to be updating

Keep in mind that no updates will actually take place if there are no
changes in the plugin feed. This might the case on a weekend / holiday,
or you've configured Nessus to poll frequently. If you're talking about
over the course of several business days, though, I'd suspect a problem.

> I saw in the nessusd.messages that the update of plugins had completed
> but the *.inc file was not 'current' so I ran the command line utility
> to update the plugins ... which in turn updated the date/timestamp
> within the plug*.inc file.

Hmm, you might just have come across an update when you ran
nessus-update-plugins manually. Is it possible you have two installs of
Nessus on the same host? If not, what sort of lines for nessusd-update
do you have in nessusd.messages?

George
--
theall@tenablesecurity.com
_______________________________________________
Nessus mailing list
Nessus@list.nessus.org
http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus

---

Now that's room service! Choose from over 150,000 hotels 
in 45,000 destinations on Yahoo! Travel to find your fit.
_______________________________________________
Nessus mailing list
Nessus@list.nessus.org
http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus