Specifications
Copyright © 2015. Tenable Network Security, Inc. All rights reserved. Tenable Network Security and Nessus are registered trademarks of Tenable Network Security, Inc.
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There are freeware tools such as “DesInstaller.app” (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7511) and “CleanApp”
(http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21453/cleanapp) that can also be used to remove Nessus. Tenable has no
affiliation with these tools and they have not been specifically tested for removing Nessus.
Migrating Nessus
It is not uncommon for a system administrator to have to migrate a Nessus implementation from one machine to another.
To migrate a Nessus installation from one Mac OS X system to another, follow the steps below. The steps cover copying
over the critical files needed as well as correctly installing Nessus on the new system.
The important files that need to be migrated from the old installation to the new installation are:
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/global.db
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/master.key
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/policies.db
The important directories that need to be migrated from the old installation to the new installation are:
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/users
/Library/Nessus/run/etc/nessus
The migration steps works for Nessus 5 and higher. You will be able to migrate from Nessus 5.2.7 to Nessus
6, but not be able to downgrade.
The first steps are done on the original system where you have Nessus installed.
1. Open a terminal window and run the sudo or su command to enable root privileges. You will be prompted for the
user password:
2. Stop the Nessus service:
# launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.tenablesecurity.nessusd.plist
3. Change to the root directory:
# cd /
4. Backup the critical files in /Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus and the entire
/Library/Nessus/run/etc/nessus directory. Given these will be copied to another system, Tenable
recommends creating a tar ball of the files and directories:
# tar -zcvf /tmp/tarOfMyNessusInstallation.tar.gz
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/global.db
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/master.key
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/policies.db
/Library/Nessus/run/var/nessus/users
/Library/Nessus/run/etc/nessus
This will create a tar file in the /tmp directory with the name tarOfMyNessusInstallation.tar format.
5. Copy over the tar ball to the new server:
# scp /tmp/tarOfMyNessusInstallation.tar.gz mynewsystem:/tmp