Do you KDE?

I am not a fan of gnome, I do like the look and feel of KDE. Switching your desktop in Kali linux is pretty easy. You have a couple options when it comes to using custom desktops in Kali. The first option is stay with the default Gnome, the second option is login with Gnome after install and then install your favorite desktop, The final option is build a custom iso.

Option 2 is pretty easy and the one that I use.

So install Kali, login as root with the password you made during the install.

I saw a great movie with my wife last night, the internship, and in the words of Vince Vaughn. You will have to setup your wireless or wired connection, and make sure your "on the line" first.

open a terminal, and get on with it.

apt-get update && apt-get install kali-defaults kali-root-login desktop-base kde-plasma-desktop

If you are interested in installing other desktops checkout the link below.

http://docs.kali.org/live-build/customize-the-kali-desktop-environment

Troubleshooting Firepower

Capturing packets
Step 1 - Log into the sfr module via ssh

Step 2 - Execute the command:

system support capture-traffic

Step3
Choose option 2 to capture data from from Single Context
Please choose domain to capture traffic from:
  0 - eth0
  1 - cplane
  2 - Single Context

Selection? 2

Step 4 - Specify your options on what to capture
Please specify tcpdump options desired.
(or enter '?' for a list of supported options)
Options: -n host (ip address of 1st host) and host (ip address of 2nd host)

The above capture option will perform a packet capture of all data between the specified two hosts.

Resetting snort

Login to the sfr module using the admin credentials.
Enter the root shell by entering expert mode:
expert


Enter your admin credentials
Elevate to root permissions

sudo su -
Enter your Admin credntials


pmtool restartbyid SFDataCorrelator
pmtool restartbytype snort

Finding the pid of a service.
pidof snort

Display logging information for traffic traversing the sfr
> system support firewall-engine-debug

Configuring things after kali is installed

After you complete the installation of kali linux, there are few things that need to be completed as post install tasks. Below is part 1 of many steps I execute as part of my post setup tasks. There is no real order to any of this, and I am writing it as I think of them.

1 Upgrade the distro to make sure you have the latest install.

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

2 Install kernel headers and virtualbox

apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) dkms virtualbox

3 Install Pureftpd. This is not really required. It is just another option to use to upload stuff during penetration tests.

apt-get install pure-ftpd

 4 This is a script I worked on while doing my OCSP. It will automagically configure Pure-FTPD.

#!/bin/bash
# bash script to setup and configure pure-ftpd server

echo "[*] Creating ftpgroup and ftpuser [*]\n"
groupadd ftpgroup
useradd -g ftpgroup -d /home/dir -s /dev/null ftpuser

echo "[*] Configuring ftpuser kryptonite [*]\n"
pure-pw useradd kryptonite -u ftpuser -d /ftphome
pure-pw mkdb
cd /etc/pure-ftpd/auth/
ln -s ../conf/PureDB 60pdb

echo "[*] Setting home directory to /ftphome/ [*]\n"
mkdir /ftphome

echo "[*] Setting permissions on home directory [*]\n"
chown -R ftpuser:ftpgroup /ftphome/

echo "[*] Setup Complete Restarting Server [*]\n"
service pure-ftpd restart

Yeah!! The blog is up, and it was not really all the painful. The hard work is yet to come as I begin to create various tutorials on various tasks.

More to come soon!