Troubleshooting Common Issues with Metasploit

Try not to despair if you encounter an issue while using or installing Metasploit. Check out the following answers to some of the most common issues. If your issue is not covered here, you can try to search through the community message boards for similar issues or if you are a Metasploit Pro, Express, or Ultimate customer, you can log in to the Support Portal to request additional help.

My anti-virus program interrupts the installation process

Metasploit is a software that tests whether a system is vulnerable to certain security issues. To do this, Metasploit exploits the same vulnerabilities as common malware and hacking software. This is what your anti-virus program detects and warns you about, so in this sense your anti-virus software is doing its job.

To successfully use Metasploit to test for the exploitability of the vulnerabilities, you must turn off your anti-virus product or exclude the Metasploit directory (read here how to exclude the Metasploit directory in your anti-virus software). Otherwise, your anti-virus program will prevent you from successfully using Metasploit. For some anti-virus solutions, e.g. Symantec, you may have to turn off the anti-virus service in addition to the settings in the console or UI. The same may be true for your firewall, which needs to be disabled so the payload can connect back to your system after a successful exploitation.

Rather than changing the configurations on your production machine, you may want to consider setting up a separate virtual machine on your laptop that doesn't have anti-virus or firewall installed. Unless you absolutely need Metasploit to run on your production machine, this is the safest and best option for most users.

When I try to register for a license key, I get the error: "You have entered in an invalid email/domain. You must enter a valid company email address. Please try again."

When registering for the Metasploit Pro trial, free email addresses (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail) and ISP addresses (myname@comcast.com) are blocked to prevent abuse. You should be able to use an address from a business, work, personal domain or education institution. If you don't have such an address, you can still register for Metasploit Community Edition, which does not have these restrictions.

When I try to activate Metasploit, I get the error "Activation Failed: Invalid HTTP response: 401"

This is caused by your network's HTTP proxy intercepting the update request and blocking it. Try connecting without a proxy or activate Metasploit from different network. Once Metasploit is activated, you can use it behind a proxy.

Offline activations are available for qualified Metasploit Pro customers. We regret that we cannot offer offline activations to trial or freeware users.

When I try to activate Metasploit, I get the error "Activation Failed: Hostname not known: updates.metasploit.com"

First, verify that you can resolve and access http://updates.metasploit.com/. If you try to reach it in your browser, you should see the message "Success: The Metasploit Update Server is reachable." If you cannot see it, try accessing it by IP address: http://184.154.104.2. If you can see it now, the issue is with the DNS resolution, and you should add the IP address to your local host list.

After you have verified you can reach updates.metasploit.com, restart the Metasploit services.

I am located in a prohibited country

US law prohibits us from providing our software to specific countries; given that a portion of our products are open source, this restriction is enforced during the activation process. This Wikipedia link lists the countries that are on the US embargo list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargoes.

If your country is not listed but specific persons in your country are, the rules indicate we must block access unless we know otherwise. You're still free to use the open source Metasploit Framework, which doesn't require registration, but the commercial interface will not be available.