7MS #158: Pentesting in a Vacuum

Brian Johnson -

How do you keep 20 Kali boxes setup with Metasploit Pro and updated without any access to the Internet? Carefully, I guess :-). In today's episode I talk about some of those challenges, as well as progress made thus far.

Here are some of the commands I mention in the podcast to get the Kali environment tuned a bit more:

Change Metasploit Pro's default listening port

  1. Edit /opt/metasploit/properties.ini
  2. Change the nginx_ssl_port= to the proper value.
  3. Restart Metasploit service.

Setup your server's MOTD (Message of the Day):

  • Edit /etc/motd to say what you need to say.

Assign static DNS addresses

nmcli con mod Wired\ connection\ 1 ipv4.dns the.first.dns.server

nmcli con mod Wired\ connection\ 1 +ipv4.dns the.second.dns.server

Note: you need to add the + before the "ipv4.dns" for the second, third, etc. DNS server, otherwise the primary address gets overwritten.

Assign NTP servers

  1. Edit /etc/ntp.conf
  2. Edit /etc/rc.local to include service ntp start before the last line. This is so the NTP service starts with every boot.

Xming setup

  • I setup a batch file with the following command whenever I want to X11-forward stuff from the Putty session to my Win7 machine:

cd "\wherever\the\executable\is\"

xming.exe -multiwindow -clipboard