My .vimrc

Here's my current .vimrc, mainly built for the MacBook Pro but also used on my Kali machines.

" My vimrc

" Set 'nocompatible' to ward off unexpected things that your distro might
" have made, as well as sanely reset options when re-sourcing .vimrc
:set nocompatible

" Used to install vim modules, docs at https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen
:execute pathogen#infect()

set ts=4 
set shiftwidth=4 
set softtabstop=4
set expandtab 
set visualbell 
set number
set nobackup
set nowritebackup

" Allow backspacing over autoindent, line breaks and start of insert action
set backspace=indent,eol,start

" Enable use of the mouse for all modes
set mouse=a

" highlight current line
set cursorline

" load filetype-specific indent files
filetype indent on

" visual autocomplete for command menu
set wildmenu

" Display the cursor position on the last line of the screen or in the status
" line of a window
set ruler
 
 " Always display the status line, even if only one window is displayed
set laststatus=2
  
" Instead of failing a command because of unsaved changes, instead raise a
" dialogue asking if you wish to save changed files.
set confirm

" Show partial commands in the last line of the screen
set showcmd

" Highlight searches (use  to temporarily turn off highlighting
set hlsearch

" When opening a new line and no filetype-specific indenting is enabled, keep
" the same indent as the line you're currently on. Useful for READMEs, etc.
set autoindent

" Enable syntax highlighting
syntax on

" Colorizations (my custom ones)
":set background=dark
"set background=light
":colorscheme solarized
":colorscheme koehler
":colorscheme vividchalk
":colorscheme distinguished
":colorscheme jellybeans

" stock vim73 colors
":colorscheme blue
":colorscheme darkblue
":colorscheme default
":colorscheme delek
":colorscheme desert
":colorscheme elflord
":colorscheme evening
:colorscheme koehler
":ocolorscheme morning
":colorscheme murphy
":colorscheme pablo
":colorscheme peachpuff
":colorscheme ron
":colorscheme shine
":colorscheme slate
":colorscheme torte
":colorscheme zellner
 
" Remember the last line in the file so we open it there next time
if has("autocmd")
  au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 1 && line("'\"") <= line("$") | exe "normal! g'\"" | endif
endif

Kali Linux update script

I've grown tired of typing in all of the commands to properly update my Kali Linux machine so I put this script together. I place all of my personal scripts in $HOME/bin and add that to my .bashrc (PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin"). Here it is:

#!/bin/bash
#
CMDS="update upgrade autoclean clean autoremove"
SUDO="sudo"
APTCMD="apt-get"
FORCE="-y"

# add any arg to add dist-upgrade
if [ ! -z $1 ]; then
 CMDS="$CMDS dist-upgrade"
 echo "Adding dist-upgrade"
 echo "Remember to reboot after"
fi


for CMD in $CMDS; do
 DO="$SUDO $APTCMD $CMD $FORCE"
 echo ""
 echo "** Running cmd: $DO"
 ${DO}
 if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
  echo "*** Something bad happened"
 else
  echo "*** Success"
 fi
done

Evolution mail on Kali

Now that I'm running Kali Linux completely on my Dell laptop I need to setup my sort of "standard" desktop environment, I'd like something similar to what I've used on the MacBook Pro for years now.

First up: email. I used the Evolution email app years back when I attempted to go Linux on my desktop and it seemed ok so I'll try it again. The first issue is that my work email is all Exchange.

Start with:

sudo apt-get evolution
sudo apt-get evolution-ews

From what I've read evolution-mapi has been deprecated (good) as Microsoft is moving away from MAPI (finally), so Exchange Web Services is it.

After installing the packages I went looking in the GNOME Applications menu and didn't see anything, note that I didn't see a GNOME post hook during package installation, have to figure out how to add that later. For now, type 'evolution' in a terminal.

It fired up and I selected Exchange Web Services as the type of mail system, passed in the auto-discovery URL (for our OWA front-end), selected NTLM (yuk) as the auth type and it seemed to discover the OAB url and such. After that Evolution started up but I don't see any email in it.

Let's see how to make it work...

ntop on Kali Linux 2.0

I recently wanted ntop on my Kali Linux 2.0 vm so I naturally tried 'apt-get install ntop', and it's not there. A little searching and I found an older Kali Git repo of it here: http://git.kali.org/gitweb/?p=packages/ntop.git;a=summary. Did a "git clone" of that URL locally then went in there and ran autogen.sh. And it's still missing a few things, I did an apt-get install of the following packages:

• automake
• autoconf
• libtool
• libtool-bin
• libgdbm-dev

Autogen.sh made it further then said it can't find RRD, so I downloaded the latest version from http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/?M=D. Went in there and ran configure only to discover more things were missing. I added the package libglib2.0-dev to start with an re-ran configure.

Now it's complaining that libpng is missing and after a quick search it appears that package was removed from Kali a little while ago. No time to track down the Deb package and such so I'll come back to this later, it's not that important.




My lab

Over the years as I've needed to learn something new I adopted a process: immersion. With this I immerse myself in a given subject area, obsessively completely, until I feel I know as much as I can. For this revisit into infosec I have been using that process but I need a laboratory to do this in. So... I'm building a lab and here's my first post on it.

The plan is to keep it cost effective so I will be purchasing nearly everything used off eBay. When I've learned enough to be pissed at the gear being slow or not doing something, I'll upgrade it, until then, eBay it is. At the same time I need the lab to be representative enough of the real world for security testing to have some value so I recently purchased (2) Dell R1950 servers. They have the following config:

• 2 x 2.6GHz quad-core Intel XXX CPU's
• 48GB RAM
• 4 x 300GB SAS disks
• 2 x 1GB ethernet

Because I want to be able to test against multiple operating system targets, I will run CentOS 7 and use KVM to virtualize. The Intel CPU's on the 1950's I have are about the bare minimum to do hardware virtualization but it works. I'll RAID4 the 4 disks and end up with something like 900GB of useable space which should be fine for some VM's. I figure with the 8 cores and 48GB of RAM I'll be able to run 6-8 VM's at the same time (1 core, 4GB RAM).

For network I'll be running 2 Cisco 3750-X switches, old but working and will run layer 3. One will go in the basement of the house which will become my "server room" and another will go on the ground floor where my desk/couch/router/wifi are at. I'll connect them together with some short fiber optic cables so I can run a pair of 10GB links in an EtherChannel. To feed the upstairs part of the house I'll likely use a Wifi bridge built from a Raspberry Pi.

And that's the basic setup I'm starting with, more to come as I install CentOS on the Dell machines.

Kali 2.0 sources.list file

I finally had a chance to sit down and verify which apt repo's should be added on a Kali linux machine. I came up with the following so things like python3-system-properties would install. Note that python-system-properties HAS been renamed to python3-system-properties.


Here's my /etc/apt/sources.list

################################################################################
#
# /etc/apt/sources.list
#
# Kali 2.0 (2017.1) apt repo source file
#
# run apt-get update after making changes to this file
#
################################################################################

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib

deb http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib