Hi there,
I have experience with Nessus but brand new to Greenbone. I just spun up an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS system and installed gvm on it but the gvmd.service is failing to start. Looks like this error has been around for a while but I wasn’t able to find a resolution.
The error is:
Can’t open PID file ‘/run/gvmd/gvmd.pid’ (yet?) after start: No such file or directory
I thought it was a perms issue but that doesn’t seem to be the case:
$ ls -alhF /run/gvmd/
total 0
drwxrwsr-x 2 _gvm _gvm 40 Apr 30 23:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 36 root root 1020 Apr 30 23:52 ../
I tried touching that file and chowning it to _gvm:*_*gvm but that didn’t work.
When I run gvm-check-setup, it reports the Postgres DB doesn’t exist:
$ gvm-check-setup
gvm-check-setup 25.04.0
This script is provided and maintained by Debian and Kali.
Test completeness and readiness of GVM-25.04.0
Step 1: Checking OpenVAS (Scanner)…
OK: OpenVAS Scanner is present in version 23.38.1.
OK: Notus Scanner is present in version 22.7.2.
OK: Server CA Certificate is present as /var/lib/gvm/CA/servercert.pem.
Checking permissions of /var/lib/openvas/gnupg/*
OK: _gvm owns all files in /var/lib/openvas/gnupg
OK: redis-server is present.
OK: scanner (db_address setting) is configured properly using the redis-server socket: /var/run/redis-openvas/redis-server.sock
OK: the mqtt_server_uri is defined in /etc/openvas/openvas.conf
OK: _gvm owns all files in /var/lib/openvas/plugins
OK: NVT collection in /var/lib/openvas/plugins contains 95086 NVTs.
OK: The notus directory /var/lib/notus/products contains 514 NVTs.
Checking that the obsolete redis database has been removed
OK: No old Redis DB
OK: ospd-openvas service is active.
OK: ospd-OpenVAS is present in version 22.10.1.
Step 2: Checking GVMD Manager …
OK: GVM Manager (gvmd) is present in version 26.15.0.
Step 3: Checking Certificates …
OK: GVM client certificate is valid and present as /var/lib/gvm/CA/clientcert.pem.
OK: Your GVM certificate infrastructure passed validation.
Step 4: Checking data …
OK: SCAP data found in /var/lib/gvm/scap-data.
OK: CERT data found in /var/lib/gvm/cert-data.
Step 5: Checking Postgresql DB and user …
OK: Postgresql version and default port are OK.
ERROR: The Postgresql DB does not exist.
FIX: Run ‘sudo runuser -u postgres – /usr/share/gvm/create-postgresql-database’
ERROR: Your GVM-25.04.0 installation is not yet complete!
Please follow the instructions marked with FIX above and run this
script again.
IMPORTANT NOTE: this script is provided and maintained by Debian and Kali.
If you find any issue in this script, please report it directly to Debian or Kali
I run that command, and it says everything is correct:
$ sudo runuser -u postgres – /usr/share/gvm/create-postgresql-database
[i] User _gvm already exists in PostgreSQL
[i] Database gvmd already exists in PostgreSQL
[i] Role DBA already exists in PostgreSQL
[*] Applying permissions
NOTICE: role “_gvm” has already been granted membership in role “dba” by role “postgres”
GRANT ROLE
[i] Extension uuid-ossp already exists for gvmd database
[i] Extension pgcrypto already exists for gvmd database
[i] Extension pg-gvm already exists for gvmd database
I re-run gvm-check-setup and it reports the same thing.
I’m not sure if it’s related to the “Can’t open PID file ‘/run/gvmd/gvmd.pid’ (yet?) after start: No such file or directory” error or if it’s a red herring but regardless, I seem to be stuck.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!