what you did while the operating system was running. If you customize or want to
maintain SSH keys or other stored credentials, you’ll need to install to local media.
Installation of Kali is straightforward. You don’t have the options that other distribu‐
tions have. You won’t select package categories. Kali has a defined set of packages that
gets installed. You can add more later or even take some away, but you start with a
fairly comprehensive set of tools for security testing or forensics. What you need to
configure is selecting a disk to install to and getting it partitioned and formatted. You
also need to configure the network, including hostname and whether you are using a
static address rather than DHCP. Once you have configured that and set your time
zone as well as some other foundational configuration settings, the packages will get
updated and you will be ready to boot to Linux.
Fortunately, Kali doesn’t require its own hardware. It runs nicely inside a VM. If you
intend to play around with security testing, and most especially penetration testing,
getting a virtual lab started isn’t a bad idea. I’ve found that Kali runs quite nicely in 4
GB of memory with about 20 GB of disk space. If you want to store a lot of artifacts
from your testing, you may want additional disk space. You should be able to get by
with 2 GB of memory, but obviously, the more memory you can spare, the better the
performance will be.
There are many hypervisors you can choose from, depending on your host operating
system. VMware has hypervisors for both Mac and PC. Parallels will run on Macs.
VirtualBox
, on the other hand, will run on PCs, Macs, Linux systems, and even
Solaris. VirtualBox has been around since 2007, but was acquired by Sun Microsys‐
tems in 2008. As Sun was acquired by Oracle, VirtualBox is currently maintained by
Oracle. Regardless of who maintains it, VirtualBox is free to download and use. If you
are just getting started in the world of VMs, this may be a place for you to start. Each
works in a slightly different way in terms of how it interacts with users. Different keys
to break out of the VM. Different levels of interaction with the operating system. Dif‐
ferent support for guest operating systems, since the hypervisor has to provide the
drivers for the guest. In the end, it comes down to how much you want to spend and
which of them you feel comfortable using.
As a point of possible interest, or at least connection, one of the
primary developers on BSD was Bill Joy, who was a graduate stu‐
dent at the University of California at Berkeley. Joy was responsible
for the first implementation in Berkeley Unix of TCP/IP. He
became a cofounder of Sun Microsystems in 1982 and while there
wrote a paper about a better programming language than C++,
which served as the inspiration for the creation of Java.
