So far, we have seen that Kali is an extremely capable and secure Debian derivative provid-
ing industrial-strength security and encryption features, advanced package management, multi-
platform capability, and (what it is most-known for) an arsenal of world-class tools for the security
professional. What might not be obvious is how Kali scales beyond the desktop to medium or large
scale deployments and even to the enterprise level. In this chapter, we will show you how well
Kali can scale beyond the desktop, providing centralized management and enterprise-level con-
trol over multiple Kali Linux installations. In short, after reading this chapter you will be able to
quickly deploy highly secure Kali systems preconfigured for your specific needs and keep them
synchronized thanks to Kali’s (semi-automatic) installation of package updates.
This level of scale requires several steps, including initiating a PXE network boot, use of an ad-
vanced configuration management tool (SaltStack), the ability to fork and customize packages,
and the deployment of a package repository. We will cover each step in detail, show you how to
get the “heavy lifting” out of the way, and deploy, manage, and maintain multitudes of custom
Kali Linux installations with relative ease. As if that were not enough, we will throw in a crowd of
minions to assist you in running your empire.
