After installing and updating openvas 9, on Linux Mint 19.3 I run a scan on the machine running openvas and get no results at all. I try it against other systems on my LAN and get no results. I used the step by step install process using sudo apt-get as directed by a techrepublic article.
All updates were successful.
Hi,
you are using an end-of-life version. See About the Greenbone Source Edition (GSE) category about the supported versions. Sadly at the moment most distributions only ship GVM/OpenVAS 9 for unknown reasons.
Additionally you should search in this forum for no results or empty scan to get some further hints and advises. Plenty topics already exist for this issue.
Sadly, indeed!
But for unknown reasons, really?
If you want, I could give you some candidates for possible reasons.
For instance, there is a new PWK (OSCP) just out:
https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/
and when you read the syllabus (download from that page), it looks like they dropped OpenVAS and put Nessus instead. They have an open Bugtracker issue about upgrading OpenVAS to a current version since November or so which says “we started working on it”. I suppose one can’t say these people lack expertise.
I guess they are overwhelmed, like many in InfoSec space. Two of the three OffSec founders are elsewhere now, and one of them has a personal page up talking about burn-out or so.
We are at a time where people will drop Win7 with an accelerated speed, and in the InfoSec space, the python2=>3 transition is hitting at the same time, and all this while the hyperscaling to the cloud is in full swing, which needs InfoSec people to adapt to a rapidly changing network landscape with all these funny cloud platform names (=tools), which make the platforms and networks much more fluid, so the whole IT space is changing at an incredible space.
All the “vendors” try to recruit “The Community” for the daily nitty gritty, Kali does this (or tries it) as much as any succeding OpenSource company does, until they break through some kind of barrier of size and income from big companies. GB is kind of in between incomewise I suppose (the biggies make billions), but the movement looks similar and you seem to have big clients which allow you to expand and to recruit into a space with a higher ressource turnover, which is great.
But concentration tends to weed out (buyout, pushing aside or into failure, whatever) smaller players, and with things changing crazily fast and many people getting behind without even realizing the changes, it seems to me that many are struggling, which takes away energy.
So I guess, in this prominent and strategic case (for GB promotion purposes), the rapid evolution of GBs work and all these architecture changes, which are not easy to grasp, might make the adoption by other people, all being deep into said constraints, more difficult, and having to make choices, the work to adopt a GSE and expecting to redu this every 6 months, it might be understandable that they prefer – maybe – to wait until it stabilizes, or get out of the weeds to re-attack the integration, etc.
I don’t know, just my 2 ct. because your “sadly” and “unknown” made me think that my take on the situation might maybe give some insight.
Greetings and have a nice Sunday, Week, etc. 
!