Video Up and Running with OpenVAS in Back Track 4 pt 1

[Archangel-Amael]

As the title states this video is on setting up OpenVAS in Back Track 4
OpenVAS (for those that don't know) is a free open source fork of Nessus. The video shows creating a certificate/user. Starting the server and client. Creating a task with scope and running the task.
It's really pretty easy and self explanatory. If you need help make a relevant post.

So you can watch the video here on blip.tv or on vimeo,. or youtube

Feedback is appreciated.
Enjoy.

Part two is here

[Lincoln]

Nice video, easy to understand and to the point.

The music definitely woke me up too

[thorin]

Two quick things:
1) Why connect to the server then set things up then reconnect? Can't you do the scope/task and then connect? Only sitting through the dl/parsing of the plugins once.
2) ~4:58 This is pretty nit picky, I dunno if it's even worth fixing but ..... The report is on the left within the scope, the content of the report (once selected on the left) displays on the right. At the point the message is displayed "Once finished, the report is on the right hand side." scope is still the item selected so there is no report info on the right yet.

On a related note I haven't had a chance to play with OpenVAS yet, what save formats are available? Does it use NBE like nessus?

[Archangel-Amael]

Nice video, easy to understand and to the point.
The music definitely woke me up too

Thanks Lincoln.

Two quick things:
1) Why connect to the server then set things up then reconnect? Can't you do the scope/task and then connect? Only sitting through the dl/parsing of the plugins once.

If I follow you correctly, once you start the server the plugins load in the server. Then once you start the client and create a task/scope the plugins and dependencies are loaded to the client. Not sure why, but it might be due to being able to have the server/ client on different machines. It seems like a pain in the @ss to me as well, not to mention the time it can take to load up.

2) ~4:58 This is pretty nit picky, I dunno if it's even worth fixing but ..... The report is on the left within the scope, the content of the report (once selected on the left) displays on the right. At the point the message is displayed "Once finished, the report is on the right hand side." scope is still the item selected so there is no report info on the right yet.

That might be a timing issue with the call-outs in the video. It was my first time working with Camtasia studio (which BTW is a really awesome program.)

On a related note I haven't had a chance to play with OpenVAS yet, what save formats are available? Does it use NBE like nessus?

Yes it does as well as, from the manual "Allows to export the currently selected report either in a re-importable format (NBE) or in a format for further processing or presentation (XML, HTML, HTML with Pies and Graphs, LaTeX, ASCII Text and PDF). It is recommended to use NBE if re-importing is planned and to use PDF for creating simple report documents that need no further editing. Use one of the others if you want to further process the report or integrate it into your own document style.

[thorin]

Nice work archangel.amael & thanks for the answers.

[Archangel-Amael]

Your welcome and I hope it helped.

[thorin]

Just in case anyone missed it OpenVAS 3.0 came out 18-Dec-2009.

I got it up and running on a plain Ubuntu box yesterday. Geez I'd forgotten about all the things I hated in Nessus 2.2.

The progress bar during connection is basically useless (just wait and hope) and you have to establish 2 connections (General and Scope) [which I'd obviously forgotten during my earlier posts in this thread ]