The Incredible Shrinking Pentest Lab

Well here's my previous setup at its very minimal consisting of 2 machines 1 as a backtrack machine and 1 as a victim machine consisting of a dual boot windows and de-ice etc booting from cd roms

This is now history and my setup consists of one of the above machines headless tucked at the side of a set of drawers running xp and vmware with backtrack 2,3 and 4 and de-ice etc all in one box. I connect to this via remote desktop (MSTSC) from my laptop and it saves my laptop being flat out in the processor dept. I'm going to try server 2003 as the guest OS to see how it fairs in terms of stability and usage as i've had the odd freeze but generally it works well.

So i've saved some room, some power and if i hadn't already had the kit i would have saved on the initial outlay aswell as there is no need for kvm's etc

I definatly think vm is the way to go another advantage is you can create a state for each os when all was well or at various stages and then just revert which is obviously very useful in a pentesting enviroment.

TP-Link 14db Directional Antenna

I've Just Sourced a TP-Link 'TL-ANT2414A'

It's a 14db directional Antenna. its comes with a 1m R-SMA male cable so it plugs straight into my edimax ew713-USG taking the place of the 4db omni. Makes a big difference now were cooking with gas




This antenna comes with a fitting kit for screwing it flat to a wall or you can fit it to a pole with the icluded screw clamps. I have no intentions of fitting it outside however and wanted a stand that would allow me to position it inside, it needed to be sturdy enough to hold it soundly but adjustable to angle it at any direction.





Off to the shed and i've found an old sky dish, hmmm... so with a few twist of a srewdriver i've managed to transform it as a stand for the aerial, the base needs a tidy but i can tilt it in any direction.