VMWare ESXi is perfect for a self contained lab, but as I’m used to having full access to a ‘real’ network there are a few things I miss not having control over for testing and other things. The biggest of these is a spanf port (or mirror port depending on your hardware). If you’re not familiar, the basic premise is to configure one (or more ports) to reproduce any traffic flowing through any port(s). This provides packet level access for debugging network problems, passing to an I[D/P]S, etc.
ESXi doesn’t provide this functionality, but does allow you to set a vSwitch to be ‘promiscuous’.
Category archives: VMware
Vyatta: First Impressions
I’ve known about Vyatta for a while, but whilst the premise has always seemed appealing I’ve not had a reason to dig deeper. Vyatta propose to be ‘The open source alternative to Cisco’, which appeals as a nice fit into a low-cost training and development lab so tonight I decided to take a closer look.
Machine migration with vmware converter
For anyone that has had to migrate machines to a virtual environment VMware’s Converter will likely be nothing new. It allows a straight forward way to migrate an existing server (both physical and most common virtual environments) to VMware’s Infrastracture, Server or Workstation product suites.
Review: Professional Penetration Testing (for EH-net)
I was recently asked by Don over at EH-Net if I would be interested in reviewing a new book by Thomas Wilhelm of Heorot.net: ‘Professional Penetration Testing: Creating and operating a formal hacking lab’. Naturally I jumped at the opportunity.
Screen Capture and Editing
As part of an upcoming project I’ve been playing with some screen capture and editing software. As I’ve never been one for for the graphical/fluffy side of IT it’s a new area for me, and I was shocked with how simple it can be. For screen capture I used the free CamStudio application, at first […]
VMware, Win7 & VirtualXP
<update-20091129> Very grateful to Timmedin for pointing me in the direction of his recent work with the same issue. In usual form, Tim has even packaged up a powershell script to automate the workaround. Check his fix here, much cleaner and slicker than my own. If your still curious, read on for the backstory. </update> […]
May SuperMondays Presentation: The Aftermath
I had a really enjoyable night at last night’s SuperMondays event. Some of the innovative uses for technology on display from Newcastle University provided a great glimpse of where we could be heading in the future towards ubiquitous computing. Of special interest were the research being undertaken with surface computing, which seems to have taken […]
Random Malware Analysis
Having recently been left with several hours to kill with nothing but a laptop and my virtual lab I thought I’d try my hand at some rudimentary malware analysis. For a random live sample I selected the most recent submission to my Nepenthes Server. $ tail -n1 /opt/nepenthes/var/log/logged_submissions[2009-05-21T19:10:59] 90.130.169.175 -> 195.97.252.143 creceive://90.130.169.175:2526 93715cfc2fbb07c0482c51e02809b937 To start […]
VMware ESXi updates
A couple of SANs ISC diaries (“Recent VMware updates available” and “VMware exploits – just how bad is it?“) should be a concern for anyone running a VMware lab (or VMware production environment). The ISC diaries explain the situation better than I could, but to cut a long story short the exploits allow a malicious […]
Sec610 Reverse Engineering Malware Demo
I spent a very interesting hour with Lenny Zeltser (and others) around a week ago with a live demo of part of Lenny’s Sec610 course. For those interested in taking the course, or malware in general, then I’d suggest that if the demo is a representative sample of the course then you’re likely to really […]