Resolving Kali Linux SetUP
As a pentester Setting up any Kali Linux is almost every month task but I recently released that there are so many things which I mostly set as default, which is not a good practice in the security field so I decided that let take a deep look what is here to understand.
Before setting up Kali Linux for a pentesting environment it is important to know that what is the purpose of your using Kali, it may general day to day usage, for a pentesting environment, or maybe for professional usage but yes Booting process remain for all cases, some setting may change according to your usage.
If you are a newbie and starting your infosec journey and encounter installing Kali Linux for the first time then I suggest you replace your Host OS and setup Kali as your main OS and begin to play with it, explore everything inside of it like directory structure, file system, terminal strength, and package management. Focus more on the manual approach and try to understand what are you doing instead of just click on the “Yes”,” install” button. The reason I am saying to install Kali as host OS is if you install kali as a Guest OS, then it is in your virtual machine you can easily switch to your favorable condition(here mostly windows OS) the reason is you have an alternative easy solution which is easier and less headache for a user to operate. Where the second way which looks tougher but as people say you have to spend 21 days to get comfortable with anything new so at least spend this much days to get familiar.
End of Suggestion: Make your nature more towards problems solving instead of ease to perform the task.
Now, what if you are not a newbie then I suppose you already know about Kali and its installation process then feel free to directly skip to the setup area I hope you find worth it to read.
During preparing for pentesting we mostly set up our kali machine inside virtualization software like a virtual box or Vmware the reason behind it is professional pentester tries to keep hacking kinda stuff separate from their professional system. Otherwise, snapshot functionality helps to clean up an infected machine, separate network functionality, and much more use google to find out more about it.
Enough talk lets get to the Title of the story, here I am using a virtual box and kali-Linux-2019.4-amd64.iso file for demo purpose.
We will see here different options lets understand each one.
1: The first one is the Boot menu:
Live(amd64): Here amd64 is the Linux architecture and the live option explains its meaning itself. Live booting means you don’t need to install OS in your ROM you can just use it by running it on RAM.
Live(amd64 failsafe): ‘failsafe’ means that during live booting if any error or failure occurred then this option may help you somewhere during troubleshooting.
Live(forensic mode): This comes under the live boot category, The difference in this mode is it does not mount on system hard drives so the operations you perform on the system do not leave any trace mostly used for recovering sensitive files and, getting evidence against crime.
Live USB persistence: In sort, Live Linux system on a USB drive means you can use your USB instead of ROM to install your OS so that you can use your USB everywhere like a Live bootable USB which store all the changes and gives the feel like HD.
Live USB persistence Encrypted Persistence: Same as USB persistence but with encryption feature also.
Install: installing OS on your Hard disk with command-line mode, No graphical interface to interact.
Graphical install: Generally used option by the first time user and the recommended one also.
Install with speech synthesis: Installing OS with speech without seeing text, use voice for instruction delivering.
Advanced option: for the advanced mode to install fairly, I didn’t try Advanced options.
2: Select your favorable language, Location, Keyboard configuration type (mostly American English), and then all the components from your .iso(mainly) file are being loaded.
3: The fourth screen is for configuring the network, Here we have to decide the hostname for our system, and for proper understanding read below screenshot details.
4: Here you can provide a domain name if you want too like kali.com otherwise leave blank.
5: Set up the root user password try to use strong, long, impossible to guess, and memorable one.
6: Now comes the partition area where we have to decide the partition area for kali installation as I select the Graphical install.
Guided-use entire disk: Means we use our whole disk memory to install kali.
Guided-use entire disk and set up LVM: Here we use our entire disk plus the LVM. You can think LVM as a logical volume here only, means you can resize the space according to your need for example if you have many partition spaces and you wanna combine them into a single one then you can use this option but yes it may be over headache to so do.
Guided-use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM: Similar to the above one but with exception of choosing an Encrypted LVM partition during the installation process.
Manual: Is for more advanced features and mainly if you like to install more OS or like to keep your disk space for other purposes take a look at the RAID topic for better understanding before selecting.
7: In the previous step, I selected the entire disk option therefore I get this ‘sda-43.3 GB ATA VBOX HARDDISK’ which my disk with space I allotted to it as I am installing in Virtual box for demo.
8: As I selected the guided-use entire disk option the installer guided us whether we want to use all files in one partition, separate /home partition or separate /home, /var and /tmp partitions let’s understand them one by one.
All files in one partition: This option will put out your all Linux OS files inside a single file system, called root (“/“) directory, one of the best options for single and new users.
Separate /home partition: Here mainly we have two partitions first one for Linux os files inside (“/“) directory and the second one is for user home directories.
Separate /home, /var, and /tmp partition: Ideal for servers and multi-user systems.
9: After choosing the type of partition, the installer presents a review of your selections on the screen as a partition map shown below. Here you are seeing a swap partition also which is like virtual memory and used if there is no free disk space or amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If all good then Finish partitioning and write changes to disk with the “yes” option.
10: Configure the package manager this option is mainly for selecting the network mirror means if you select yes then it will automatically redirect you to a mirror site that is close to your location using your internet connection but if you prefer to manually select a mirror link then select ‘“no” option and specify your desired mirror link inside /etc/apt/sources.list. My opinion is you should go with the yes option.
If you select the yes option then according to it, all configuration are being made and at last, you are presented with the GRUB boot loader installation option.
11: The boot loader is the first program started by the BIOS as all we know This GRUB boot loader loads the Linux kernel into memory and then executes it. If you didn’t have another Linux installed already then you should first install the GRUB boot loader as it works with most file systems after then you don’t need to install again for other Linux operating systems.
Installation is now complete just remove your installation media and restart the system.
This blog contains only my limited knowledge for broader look use Kali Linux website:https://www.kali.org/docs/installation/
