Install Tenable Nessus on Linux

Caution: If you install a Tenable Nessus Agent, Tenable Nessus Manager, or Tenable Nessus scanner on a system with an existing Tenable Nessus Agent, Tenable Nessus Manager, or Tenable Nessus scanner running nessusd, the installation process terminates all other nessusd processes. You may lose scan data as a result.

Note: Tenable Nessus does not support using symbolic links for /opt/nessus/.

Before you begin:

  • hostname is now a dependency for Tenable Nessus rpm installations. Therefore, when installing any Tenable Nessus 10.8.x rpm package, you must also install a hostname package if one has not already been installed. You can do so by running the install hostname command that is specific to your Linux operating system. For example:

    zypper install -y hostname

    Some Linux CLI tools automatically include dependencies when you install the Tenable Nessus package (yum install, for example). In these cases, you do not have to separately install hostname.

To install Nessus on Linux:

  1. Download the Tenable Nessus package file.

  2. From the command line, run the Tenable Nessus installation command specific to your operating system.

    Example Tenable Nessus install commands:

    # dpkg -i Nessus-<version number>-debian6_amd64.deb

    # pkg add Nessus-<version number>-fbsd10-amd64.txz

    # yum install Nessus-<version number>-es6.x86_64.rpm

    # sudo zypper install Nessus-<version number>-suse12.x86_64.rpm

  3. From the command line, restart the nessusd daemon.

    Example Tenable Nessus daemon start commands:

    # systemctl start nessusd

    # service nessusd start

  4. Open Tenable Nessus in your browser.

    • To access a remotely installed Tenable Nessus instance, go to https://<remote IP address>:8834 (for example, https://111.49.7.180:8834).

    • To access a locally installed Tenable Nessus instance, go to https://localhost:8834.

  5. Perform the remaining Tenable Nessus installation steps in your browser.