Nessus 3.0 on Gentoo

With the release of Nessus 3.x, the developers have made the decision to no longer distribute source code. Because of this, nessus binaries will only install on "supported platforms". However, I have recently discovered a way around this severe limitation.

This is a quick and dirty guide to get Nessus 3.0 to install on Gentoo.

First, download Nessus-3.0.3-fc5.i386.rpm from nessus.org

Use rpm2targz Nessus-3.0.3-fc5.i386.rpm to convert the package from RPM format to a gzip'ed tar file.

Move the resulting file to your / directory.

Use tar -zxvf Nessus-3.0.3-fc5.i386.tar.gz to decompress and un'tar the file.

Edit /etc/ld.so.conf and append /opt/nessus/lib to the end of the file.

Run ldconfig to make those changes take effect.

Next, cd into your /usr/lib directory and do the following:

ln -s libssl.so.0.9.7 libssl.so.6
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.7 libcrypto.so.6

You can now finish installing nessus as normal (e.g /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-mkcert). You can also test your installation by running the command: /opt/nessus/sbin/nessusd -d



[UPDATE] You will need to edit /opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-update-plugins . Look for the line reading "gzip=/usr/bin/gzip" and change it to read "gzip=/bin/gzip"

[UPDATE 2] Instead of making the change to /etc/ld.so.conf above, you should create a file in the /etc/env.d/ directory called 08nessus. Then file should only contain the line: LDPATH=/opt/nessus/lib. This change is necessary because the env-update script will overwrite the changes you make directly to /etc/ls.so.conf.