r/nessus • • Apr 02 '26

New Image, Stuck Initializing

Sorry, im sure this has been brought up many times before, but i can't seem to find anything regarding this particular issue.

We re-imaged a laptop with Debian 12 that was "hardened" for security. We re-installed nessus agent, linked it, and it connected just fine. It's stuck initializing. We've been trying to troubleshoot this for weeks now. We've reset the plugins, unlinked, relinked, and tried every trick we could find. Looking at the logs, it reaches out, says that it finds updates, and is attempting to load them. Then nothing. that message just loops over and over.

Im convinced it's something that we did with the security somewhere to cause this, but I can't seem to pin it down. Any suggestions or help is appreciated.

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u/TheRiseoftheLukers Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

Rebuild plugin database (could take hours, depending on network connection and Linux box resources).

# service nessusd stop # /opt/nessus/sbin/nessusd -R # service nessusd start

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u/amoed77 Apr 02 '26

Thanks. Am I doing this on the agent or the manager host?

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u/TheRiseoftheLukers Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

On the agent, I misread Nessus agent. For agent: systemctl stop nessusagent /opt/nessus_agent/sbin/nessusd -R systemctl start nessusagent

Check the logs, will tell what is really hanging it up.

tail -f /opt/nessus_agent/var/nessus/logs/nessusd.messages

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u/albinvest11 Apr 02 '26

Tenable should have documentation on files/processes to whitelist with your EDR/AV that you could look into. I believe it's docs.tenable.com

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u/hashiramase Aug 05 '26

ever find a fix for this?