Cus Productions

Well, after having my EEE for a few days we finally got broadband at the house so I could start updating and ‘tinkering’.

Given the capabilities of the machine for the price you get quite a lot of nice hardware that’s suitable for penetration testing. With that in mind, I installed Backtrack.

More than 300 pen-test and security tools at my disposal, plus my own tool sets = an ideal little device. This is where my laptop is overkill (except for computing RC4 collisions in WEP keys or other algorithmic analases) and a PDA is just too small to convey the information and store the tools efficiently. Even with the computational stuff, I’ll look at connecting to my base PC and streaming the data for off-unit processing. The Atheros wireless chipset is an ideal base for testing, and data injection can be performed.

The only downside is that Backtrack is based around SLAX which isn’t my ideal distro, but it’s serviceable and I’m sure over time I’ll start bending it to my will. It beats my laptop setup security-wise which is a set of around 70 tools I’ve acquired that I’ve got to check for updates for quite often. This issue of Backtrack brings ‘Fast-Track’ for performing updates to the various tools and their dependencies.

Took delivery of my EEEPC yesterday. So far it’s solicited many cries of ‘ahhhhhhhh’ at the office – it’s that cute Took a while to come though (see my previous post)

First impressions are that it’s fast enough to do everything I need. The resolution of 800×480 is enough to get all my usual jobs done without breaking out the big laptop unless I want to do virtualisation or development work. I’ll shift some of my pen testing utilities onto it to see how the wireless card fares, but I admit that’s quite a non-standard use for the platform. It doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot so I can’t do wireless sniffing and injection at the same time, but how many people need that? To the lay-person, this provides email access, web and all the office stuff they usually need, and they won’t even realise it’s running Linux. While the traditional Linux desktop is still trying to make inroads with home users via KDE and Gnome Desktop Environments, it’s hardware like this that will really have people using Linux. After all, it’s not about using Linux – it’s about getting the job done, which is what we’re all here to do.

This won’t replace my mobile phone (Mio A701 running Windows Mobile 6) and won’t replace my laptop (running Kubuntu), but then I wouldn’t expect it to. There’s room for a ‘middle ground’ in mobile devices when you need something with a usable built in keyboard and a decent screen that has room for user-defined applications for power users.

As an aside – I heard more and more parents were being asked to buy laptops for their kids for birthdays and Christmas. Maybe that’ll be replaced by this kind of device – big enough to comfortably use while being small enough to fit in a rucksack/satchel/man-bag. It’ll certainly be easier on the pocket