DeadBeefCafe

There are some tools that are just cool, I’ve tried to put links to some of them in our information pages. There are other tools that are pretty sucky, we try to bash into them for security problems.

Then there’s tools that make all the other tools more useful. One of these is VMWare. Anyone that’s done a computer security class likely knows about it already. You set up one computer, install VMWare, and then install a number of other computers inside of it. It’s great! You can set up an entire lab of computers to play with on one workstation with a bunch of memory. Which means you can have a couple victims, and a couple of attacking hosts of various OS flavors and your favorite tools, or tools you want to test, or configurations you want to test.

You know those single ISO OS images? You can point your first CDRom in vmware to that iso image, and it’s as if you put the CD in the drive. Same with floppy images (this worked great for me recently when I wanted a fast minimal install of FreeBSD 4.11-final when I didnt’ want to wait for an ISO to download on the less hotel wireless network).

And now, this great multi-facted highly practical tool is free.

But wait, there’s more… they (VMWare) are also encouraging people to build downloadable VMs (Virtual Machines) which are preconfigured and ready to go. Maybe a vendor you’re working with has one for that product you want to evaluate, nice and simple.

And my latest thought on the whole VM thing is: game makers could build inside a VM and control every aspect of the OS: file system, memory management, display, and resource allocation. Imagine the creativity you could have with a game engine with that level of control and flexibility.

If you want to check out VMWare: www.vmware.com