Manually Update Plugins for your PVS

I had an issue the other day with one of my Passive Vulnerability Scanners (PVS) which is being managed by Security Center. In Security Center the status of one of the PVS scanners showed "Plugin Out of Sync". I tried to push the plugins to the PVS scanner from the Security Center, but I was getting a status error of "Connection timed out".  So basically I was getting a latency issue on the connection. The PVS scanner and the Security Center are in different states, so this may be why there is so much latency. I just built this PVS scanner, so there were just too many plugins to be pushed over the wire by Security Center. To fix this issue, I just manually copied the plugins to the PVS scanner. Then I manually loaded the plugins into the PVS scanner. After I did this, I have not had this issue again.

Follow the instructions below to manually install plugins for the PVS scanner.

1. Login to the PVS scanner.

root@earth> ssh pvs

2. Stop the PVS service.

root@nessus> service pvs stop

3. Load the plugins into PVS.

root@nessus> /opt/pvs/var/pvs --update-plugins  plugins_file.tar.gz 

4. Start the PVS service

root@nessus> service pvs start

5. Login with an admin account to the web interface for the Security Center and check the status of the PVS.

You're done.

If you have any questions or comments please post them below.

Related post on this Blog
Manually Update Plugins on a Nessus Scanner
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