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About OpenVAS-Client

Screenshot of OpenVAS-Client Main Dialog

OpenVAS-Client is a terminal and GUI client application for OpenVAS. It implements the OpenVAS Transfer Protocol (OTP) which has superseded the Nessus Transfer Protocol (NTP) in OpenVAS. The GUI is implemented using GTK+ 2.4 and allows you to control an OpenVAS server, to conduct network vulnerability scans and to manage the results of your scans.

OpenVAS-Client is a successor of NessusClient 1.X. The fork happened with NessusClient CVS HEAD 20070704. The reason was that the original authors of NessusClient decided to stop active development for this (GTK-based) NessusClient in favor of a newly written QT-based version released as proprietary software.

OpenVAS-Client is released under GNU GPLv2 and may be linked with OpenSSL.

Supported Languages

(status of 2.0-rc1, 2008-12-11)

Installing OpenVAS-Client

Recommended: Once you have installed OpenVAS-Client, you should subscribe to the openvas-announce mailing list. It is a low-traffic list which helps you to follow all OpenVAS news and important changes.

Readily available installation package

Please note: OpenVAS may not yet be available for all platforms and distributions. Please ask the package maintainers of the distribution of your choice to package OpenVAS 2.0.0 or use the source code release.

Various platforms via OBS

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/OpenVAS:/STABLE:/v3/

With the OpenSUSE Build Service, packages are currently build for the following distributions:

. Packages can be downloaded from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/OpenVAS:/STABLE:/v3/.

Debian "Sid" (unstable)

OpenVAS-Client is an official Debian package for the distribution "unstable" ("Sid"). You can find more information about the Debian packages on the OpenVAS-Client package page for Sid.

This means you can simply install OpenVAS-Client on Debian Sid with the following command:

# apt-get install openvas-client

Debian 5.0 "Lenny" (stable) with Debian Backports

For Debian 5.0 "Lenny" the inofficial Debian Backports repository hosts current packages of all openvas modules. For a more detailled installation guide look at the instructions on http://backports.org.

  1. Get backports Source included: (This step has to be done just once)

    # echo "deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
    # aptitude update
    # echo "Package: *" >> /etc/apt/preferences
    # echo "Pin: release a=lenny-backports" >> /etc/apt/preferences
    # echo "Pin-Priority: 200" >> /etc/apt/preferences

  2. Install OpenVAS:

    # aptitude -t lenny-backports install openvas-client

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

OpenVAS-Client is not an official package for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. To enable you to easily run OpenVAS-Client the OpenVAS project provides backports. You can install OpenVAS-Client by following these steps:

deb http://apt.intevation.de/ etch openvas

Then, update your package list and install OpenVAS-Client:

# apt-get update # apt-get install openvas-client

Note: If you know of further sources for backports, let the OpenVAS team know and they will be added to this list.

Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"

OpenVAS-Client has been added to the Ubuntu 8.10 release ("Intrepid Ibex") which was released in October 2008. You can find more information about the Ubuntu package on the OpenVAS Client package page for Intrepid Ibex.

This means you can simply install OpenVAS-Client on Ubuntu 8.10 with the following command:

# apt-get install openvas-client

Note: Backported packages are also available for the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release ("Hardy Heron"). To install OpenVAS-Client on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, simply follow the instructions for Debian 4.0 "Etch" as described above.

Gentoo

Please see the installation instructions for Gentoo on the OpenVAS-Server page.

OpenSUSE 10.2, 10.3, 11.0, 11.1 (also Fedora 8, 9, 10, Mandriva 2007, 2008, 2009 and others)

There is an unofficial repository containing RPMs for RPM based distributions like OpenSUSE, Fedora, RHEL and Mandriva at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/openvas:/.

Be aware that the URL you will have to add as the new repository is specific to your distribution. For example, if you are using OpenSUSE 10.2, you will want to add the following URL:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/openvas:/STABLE/openSUSE_10.2/
Likewise, if you are using Mandriva 2008, you should use this URL:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/openvas:/STABLE/Mandriva_2008/
The complete list of URLs is available at:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/security:/openvas:/STABLE/.

See http://en.opensuse.org/Add_Package_Repositories_to_YaST on how to add a repository and http://opensuse-community.org/Installing_Software on how to install Software with YaST.

RHEL 4, 5, CentOS 4, 5 and Fedora 4-10

Packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, CentOS 4 and 5 and Fedora from 4 up to 10 are available from an unofficial repository at http://www.atomicorp.com/channels/atomic/.

The archives are available through the yum package manager for Fedora, RHEL and CentOS. These archives require access to both the vendors base and update channels, RHEL 4 users are therefore recommended to access the archives through up2date. More information is available from the archive website.

Windows XP SP2

In the download area you will find the file OpenVAS-Client-N.N.N-M-LL-setup.exe where N.N.N stands for the version of OpenVAS-Client, M for the package release number and LL for the language (e.g. en=English, de=German, sv=Swedish).

Slackware

The OpenVAS-Client program is not an official Slackware package but it can be easily obtained from the SlackBuilds.org project.

You can build the openvas-client following the generic SlackBuilds.org howto.

Or, if you use sbopkg, you can run this single command:
# sbopkg -i openvas-client
You'll need the GTK and OpenSSL libraries, available from the standard Slackware sets.

FreeBSD

The OpenVAS-Client program is not an official FreeBSD port, however recent ports are available on http://www.freshports.org .

Latest source code release

The download link for the latest source code release can be found in the "Download" box to the right.

Download the ".tar.gz" source code archive and unpack with "tar -xzf openvas-client-N.N.N.tar.gz". Compiling from source is currently geared towards GNU/Linux systems, but may work as well in other environments.

Now read the README file inside the new directory for further instructions.

Most current state of development (directly from the source code management system)

After checking out the code, change to the new directory and follow the instructions in the README file.

You need subversion to retrieve the code:

$ svn checkout https://svn.wald.intevation.org/svn/openvas/trunk/openvas-client

Although the OpenVAS team is committed to maintaining a high code quality, please be aware that you are using a development state that may be incomplete and unstable and should not be used in production environments.