OpenVAS 8 Internal error while creating credentials

[dss]

Hello world!
Using Greenbone Security Assistant version 6.0.1 web GUI and trying to create under Configuration > Credentials a new entry fails with return error message:

Internal error: create_lsc_credential_omp:4506 (GSA 6.0.1)
An internal error occurred while creating a new credential. It is unclear whether the credential has been created or not. Diagnostics: Failure to receive response from manager daemon.

Notice that this is a brand new OpenVAS installation, no other credentials exist and is under Kali Linux 1.1.0a distribution.
Furthermore, he web form for NEW CREDENTIAL has fields Name, Login and Password which are mandatory to be filled.
If only Name is not null and form is submitted using Create Credential button, the error screen of ""Results of last operation" with Status message "At least one entered value contains invalid characters or exceeds a size limit. You may use the Back button of your browser to adjust the entered values. If in doubt, the online help of the respective section will lead you to the appropriate help page." appears as expected. The same is true if any other single mandatory field is given. Again as expected.
But, if Name and any other mandatory field is filled then this internal error appears.
This should help.

Dennis.

[nicci]

Hi dss,

I faced the same problem and after half a day googling I succesfully applied following solution:

Create directory /var/lib/openvas/gnupg [mkdir /var/lib/openvas/gnupg]
Not that the creation of credentails takes quite some time (minutes)

Nicci

[dss]

Log file proved to be useful. OpenVAS credential issue resolved.
As nicci advised (many thanks!) I have found out, when OpenVAS is creating Local Security Checks - LSC Credentials messages are logged in file /var/log/openvas/openvasmd.log one. According to these messages the error had something to do with GNU Privacy Guard - GnuPG utility gpg not able to use home directory. Actual message logged was: Setting GnuPG homedir failed: No such file or directory one.
OpenVAS version 8 used in Kali 1.1.0a release has this home directory set to /var/lib/openvas/gnupg/ one. But this directory was not present! Creating it as root user simply resolved the issue.
Worth mentioning is that OpenVAS Manager stores private key and password parts of target credentials encrypted. Whenever a first credential object gets created, it is logged in log file that a new key generation is starting. The key generation could take some time. While waiting it is advised to generate some load in Linux system (like with ls -laR / command and even more operations) because gpg is using kernel random number generator. The kernel generator gets entropy (randomness) from all kinds of places, among them is interrupt timing, for certain interrupts. Moving the mouse (and typing, disk activity, etc.) will all generate interrupts and thus more entropy to the system which will reduce the waiting time for key generation. The amount of entropy in kernel can be read using cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail command.