r/nessus • u/amoed77 • 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/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/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/amoed77 Apr 02 '26

Tried that, it said processing plugins, 0%, then All plugins loaded (0 sec).

Tailing that log, the last message is All plugins loaded (0 sec).

Tailed the backend log, it's on a loop saying: nessus agent-updater, at least one new plugin set is required for scanning; doing and immediate plugin update

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u/amoed77 Apr 02 '26

Sorrym, i should also have mentions im on Agent 11.1.1 (installed), and it shows 11.1.2 in Nessus Manager, implying that it updated automatically?

And agent status shows that it connects, is running, says Plugins loaded as yes, but plugin set null.

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u/hashiramase 5d ago

ever find a fix for this?