Security Testing Lab (Part 1)
Security Testing Lab (Part 1)
Recently I have been wanting to do more and more security testing. It is hard to safe an secure testing unless you have your own environment setup. I have seen labs with lots of physical machines which is all well and good but not really a practical solution in my current living situation. So the alternative is to have one box and run virtual machines on it. Since VMWare has been so nice to give ESXi away for free, (with some reduced abilities) I have decided to go that route.
Here is a list of components I purchased from newegg.com for this project:
- BIOSTAR MCP6P M2+ 6.X AM3/AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 / nForce 430 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
- AMD Athlon II X3 435 Rana 2.9GHz 3 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 95W Triple-Core Processor
- PQI POWER Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit
- Rosewill RCX-Z80-AL 80mm Sleeve CPU Cooler
Total cost: $202.33 (shipped)
As for a case, PSU, and hard drives I already had stuff laying around so I didn’t need to buy it.
After getting it all put together, It was time to install VMWare. After booting it up (3.5 u5) I got an error saying that it could not find any drive to install it on. I originally thought that possibly this board was not supported, so I booted up ESXi 4 but that did not work either, saying the network card was not supported. I did some searching around and found a link to this site
http://www.techhead.co.uk/installing-vmware-esx-and-esxi-35-on-an-hp-proliant-ml115-g5-quad-core
which got me to thinking to just install it on a flash drive. So after searching some more I found this guys post
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/07/29/esxi-35-update-2-on-a-usb-memory-key/. Since I was already on a linux box I didn’t need to do the windows specific stuff, just used the command:
dd if=/home/username/Desktop/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd of=/dev/sdc
Obviously you will have to change the image name and the device you are writing it to, to fit your specific setup. After installing it failed. After trying to figure out why it failed I read someone else’s blog that said he had similar problems and it turned out to be a bad flash drive. I had never had any trouble with this flash drive in the past but I was willing to try it because I was out of options at this point. I grab another 2gb flash drive and wrote the dd image to that and sure enough, after booting from the USB drive it booted up with no errors and I had a working ESXi 3.5 server. I configured the the static IP, Netmask, and Gateway and proceeded to install the VMWare infrastructure client.
Next post I will talk about setting up the environment.