Greenbone Security Assistant: "Failed to start task: Service temporarily down"

Archive Greenbone Community Edition
1

I’m attempting to create a task by going to Scans > Tasks, and pressing Task Wizard. I type in the IP address of a host on my network, press Start Scan, and I get the following error message:

“Failed to start task: Service temporarily down”

GVM versions

gsa: Greenbone Security Assistant 8.0.0
gvm: Greenbone Vulnerability Manager 8.0.0, Manager DB revision 205
openvas-scanner: OpenVAS Scanner 6.0.0
gvm-libs: (I don’t understand the question, sorry.)

Environment

Operating system: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)
Kernel: Linux network-scanner 4.15.0-58-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 6 11:12:41 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Installation method / source: I installed from this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mrazavi/+archive/ubuntu/gvm

Troubleshooting attempted

  • Restarting the entire system
  • This page indicates that the error message means that gsad cannot reach the scanner service. I ran the following command:

# systemctl status openvas-scanner

● openvas-scanner.service - LSB: remote network security auditor - scanner
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/openvas-scanner; generated)
   Active: failed (Result: timeout) since Mon 2019-08-19 17:16:59 MDT; 7min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 432 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/openvas-scanner start (code=killed, signal=TERM)
    Tasks: 1 (limit: 2340)
   CGroup: /system.slice/openvas-scanner.service
           └─450 /usr/sbin/openvassd

Aug 19 17:11:59 network-scanner systemd[1]: Starting LSB: remote network security auditor - scanner...
Aug 19 17:16:59 network-scanner systemd[1]: openvas-scanner.service: Start operation timed out. Terminating.
Aug 19 17:16:59 network-scanner systemd[1]: openvas-scanner.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.
Aug 19 17:16:59 network-scanner systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: remote network security auditor - scanner.

Since it is listed as failed, I tried the following command:

# systemctl restart openvas-scanner

…which never finishes.

  • The last 4 lines of /var/log/gvm/openvassd.log are:

    lib kb:CRITICAL:2019-08-19 23h00.50 utc:451: get_redis_ctx: redis connection error: No such file or directory
    lib kb:CRITICAL:2019-08-19 23h10.01 utc:452: get_redis_ctx: redis connection error: No such file or directory
    lib kb:CRITICAL:2019-08-19 23h10.01 utc:452: redis_new: cannot access redis at ‘/var/run/redis/redis.sock’
    lib kb:CRITICAL:2019-08-19 23h10.01 utc:452: get_redis_ctx: redis connection error: No such file or directory

…which indicates that it cannot connect to redis. However, redis is running fine, as far as I can tell, according to systemctl status, and there is a socket located at /var/run/redis/redis.sock:

$ ls -l /var/run/redis/redis.sock
srwxr-xr-x 1 redis redis 0 Aug 19 17:11 /var/run/redis/redis.sock