it began as just looking into the toolsets used by the now-infamous BackTrack – a slax based live cd used for wireless network penetration testing – but knowing it was slackware based was all i needed to know that toolkits exist to add this functionality to my laptop. and the digging began….i’m only going to post findings and tools incrementally as i gain enough knowledge of them to answer at least the basic install and use questions.
and so i was brought to metasploit; an exploitation framework (probably for beginners like myself) used for penetration testing of workstations, servers, and network protocols. i found the installtion to be pretty straightforward, despite the fact that where i was looking the documentation was lacking (they probably assume that given a set of requirements the user figures out how to get there themselves).
for my vanilla slack-current, i was required to add in rubygems and then install rails:
#gem install -v=1.2.2 rails
at this point i unpacked the framework and launched the web-console (yes…pitiful to use the gui, but it was what i chose to do). i suggest getting to this point and seeing where the web interface takes you ;-)