Initial setup of mars

Working on newton via PXE

Then cronus via USB

Mars

This was really straightforward, nothing fancy.

Jupiter

I had a DVD install of Kali Linux that worked fine on mars, but didn't work on jupiter because of an optical drive problem. I was getting "non-bootable media" errors when I forced it to boot from the CD.

Pressing F10 during bootup on jupiter boots from the network. The plan is to set up a PXE boot server on the network, and serve up a fresh Kali .iso image to jupiter.

Setting Up PXE Server

Following these instructions.

Install dnsmasq

$ apt-get install dnsmasq

Change dnsmasq configuration

$ vim /etc/dnsmasq.conf

set the options:

interface=eth0
dhcp-range=192.168.101.100,192.168.101.200,12h
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/tftpboot/
dhcp-option=3,192.168.101.1
dhcp-option=6,8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4

Restart dnsmasq

service dnsmasq restart

Make PXE Netboot Images

Make the images available via the PXE server with the following commands:

mkdir -p /tftpboot
cd /tftpboot
# for 32 bit systems:
wget http://repo.kali.org/kali/dists/kali/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
tar zxpf netboot.tar.gz
rm netboot.tar.gz

Errors

Doing a basic install, the installer would download files from the Debian release repository. But after it got to 100%, it would give me a red screen and an error about a bad archive mirror.

This was really, really frustrating, not least because everyone who asked this question online got the same, unhelpful, irrelevant answers.

And not a single answer that worked. All the threads are dead, or ended mid-conversation. The last one looked halfway promising, but nope.

My Solution

I gave up on a network install and put a Kali Linux iso onto a jump drive. Instructions here.

Bootable Kali USB jump drive

To put a Kali Linux iso onto a USB drive...

First, download the iso file for the right distribution. Put the iso on a computer with Linux. Plug the jump drive into the Linux computer with the iso file.

From the Linux computer, run the following command:

dd if=kali-linux-1.0.9a-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=512k

Make sure you know which /dev/sdX is your jump drive, and which is your hard drive! You can list your disk partitions with the command:

fdisk -l

The dd command will put the iso onto the jump drive:

root@mars:/iso/kali-linux-1.1.0a-i386# dd if=kali-linux-1.1.0a-i386.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=512k
6058+1 records in
6058+1 records out
3176333312 bytes (3.2 GB) copied, 542.667 s, 5.9 MB/s

took about 15 minutes.

Installing on Jupiter

SImple, easy, just had to hit F10 when booting to get into the bios and change the boot order to boot from USB first.

After that, I booted into the installer and was on my way in no time, without any of the problems I was seeing about bad repository mirrors when I used the PXE network boot method.

Kali 2015-06-16

From charlesreid1

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