Setting Up Your Lab

Outline

We would like to prepare our computers to run a Linux security (network penetration testing) distribution inside a virtual machine. You need to carry out the following tasks.

Setup VMware Workstation Player/Pro on your system.
Download Parrot Security OS Mate ISO file.
Install Parrot Security OS in a virtual machine (VM).

If you need help with the above tasks, keep reading this appendix.

FAQ

VM versus USB Flash Drive

It is possible write your Linux ISO file to a USB flash memory drive, and use this USB drive to boot your laptop. This has a few advantages:

Improved performance for the Linux system as the OS is not virtualized.
Ability to access hardware devices directly, in particular wireless network cards for WiFi related security tasks.

But this carries various disadvantages:

Your main computer OS, be it MS Windows or Linux, won’t be conveniently accessible after you boot from the USB memory.
Therefore, for convenience, this would require you to set an extra computer for such purposes. This make it bulky to carry around.
Although supported, it is not very efficient/easy to update your system and install new packages on a system booting from a USB memory.

Linux Security Distributions

There are many great Linux security distributions. One can try different ones and stick to what he/she likes most.

Kali Linux

Like Parrot OS, Kali Linux is based on Debian Linux. It is one of the most popular network penetration testing distributions.

Pentoo

Pentoo is based on Gentoo Linux.

BlackArch

BlackArch is based on Arch Linux.

Parrot OS

My personal preference is Parrot OS. This is because Parrot OS requires relatively low resources and is relatively very fast to get it setup.

Virtualization Software

There are different virtualization software that one can choose from.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is FOSS under GPLv2 for the most part, except for the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack. It is very popular choice.

VMware Workstation Player

VMware Workstation Player is free for non-commercial use and closed-source virtualization from VMware.

VMware Workstation Pro

VMware Workstation Pro provides various features not found in Player. It is priced at $199 at the time of writing. It is my preferred choice.

Demo

Download Parrot Security Mate

Parrot Security

Setup VMware Workstation/Player VM

VMware Workstation/Player

VMware Workstation/Player Select ISO File

VMware Workstation/Player Select Linux and the latest Debian 64-bit

VMware Workstation/Player - Name your VM properly

VMware Workstation/Player - 100 GB is a safe choice to start. Split the virtual disk into multiple files for ease of VM copying if needed

VMware Workstation/Player - You can further customize the hardware if you like

VMware Workstation/Player VM Created

VMware Workstation/Player Boot the ISO image

Install Parrot OS

Parrot OS - We want to install Parrot OS on our VM

Parrot OS - You can choose Standard Installer or GUI installer.

Parrot OS - Choose your default language

Parrot OS - Select your country

Parrot OS - Asia

Parrot OS - Lebanon

Parrot OS - Default locale setting is en_US

Parrot OS - Select Keyboard Keymap

Parrot OS - We need to think of two strong passwords, one for root and one for user

Parrot OS - The root password should be practically impossible to guess, whether using a dictionary attack or brute-force attack. Make sure you memorize the root password as the root account gives you full access to the system.