Vincent Arnold

After working with VM’s for the past 3 months, I realized I needed a separate notebook for penetration testing. Nothing against VM’s but it is just a lot easier to fire up a notebook in Linux and start without having to deal with all the security mitigations I have in place on my Windows notebook. I just recently started to look at Live CD distributions for Linux, particularly Backtrack 2 and will offer more feedback on those at a later time.

I was looking for an inexpensive notebook that was not totally gimp and had some upgradeability options. After looking at the field of cheap notebooks on sale over the Labor Day holiday, I purchased a Toshiba a Toshiba A135-S4527 for $450 and installed Fedora Core 7 (Open Source Red Hat Linux). The only thing missing from this notebook was a webcam but for the purposes of Pen Testing, a webcam is not needed. As far as Linux distributions, I looked into Ubuntu and BSD but Ubuntu is way too user friendly and BSD is bit more difficult to use for my tastes at the moment. I chose Fedora Core 7 because it seemed to be right in between those in terms of ease of use and features.

As far as the install onto the notebook, I have tested everything out of the box except for WiFi. Everything after the first install ran perfectly, including sound. There were a ton of updates it pulled down through the ethernet connection to the web. I will test the WiFi connection tomorrow and update. I am pretty confident it will work just as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 5:23 am and is filed under Penetration Testing.