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Some help for building Nessus
Authored by: joelr on Jan 13, '02 10:00:31PM

Just wanted to help with a little pointer about building Nessus. We use it quite it extensively at work, it's really quite handy, and a very well done security application. At work we use the server end on FreeBSD boxes and run the NessusWX client off our Windows2000 clients. I hadn't really had a chance to try the build on Mac OS X yet so I took some time this evening to see what if any problems I would run into. Really none. It is so wonderful having BSD under Mac OS now!!

What follows is the process I used. I had some compiling warnings building the 1.1.11 [experimental] branch but no show stoppers. I built this on 10.1.2 with the Dec dev tools.

*** If you have not already done so download and build nmap, another great security tool and one that Nessus depends on. I did not already have nmap installed on the machine that I built Nessus on so I downloaded and built 2.54Beta30 and it built right out of the box.

http://www.insecure.org/nmap/


Download the Nessus 1.1.11 pieces at:
http://www.nessus.org/experimental.html

nessus-libraries
libnasl
nessus-core
nessus-plugins

*** Building them in the above order is important

In the directory that you downloaded the pieces too.

tar xzvf nessus-libraries-1.1.11.tar.gz
cd ./nessus-libraries
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

tar xzvf libnasl-1.1.11.tar.gz
cd ./libnasl
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..


tar xzvf nessus-core-1.1.11.tar.gz
cd ./nessus-core

*** The --disable-gtk part is important if you don't have the X-Windows stuff
*** on your OS X box.

./configure --disable-gtk
make
sudo make install
cd ..

tar xzvf nessus-plugins-1.1.11.tar.gz
cd nessus-plugins
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

That should be all you need to build it if you have a current OS X install and dev tools.

Lastly you could fashion a startup item to launch the nessusd daemon on boot if you wanted to. I didn't since I won't need it all the time. You could use any of the current
/System/Library/StartupItems as a template.

I just run as root (when I need it)

/usr/local/sbin/nessusd &

You will also need to create a user to access the nessusd daemon.

/usr/local/sbin/nessus-adduser

Since we didn't build in any of the GTK stuff only the command line client works on OS X.

/usr/local/bin/nessus

use the --help option for more details. This may be heresy on a Mac OS site but if you have access to a Windows PC that has network access to the Mac OS box that you are running the nessusd daemon on take a look at the NessusWX windows client.
http://www.securityprojects.org/nessuswx/

As a side note, for someone with more determination and time on their hands then me, the nessus command line client might provide someone with the basis for an excellent AppleScript Studio project. I would love to use a Mac OS X client that was a smooth as the NessusWX Windows client.

Good luck,
JoelR.



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