Paul Blankenbaker announced yesterday the release of Network Security Toolkit 2.11.0, a completely redesigned and engineered version of this Linux distribution that provides tools for system administrators and security experts.
The developers have based the system on Fedora Live CD technology, which provides support for the use of RPM software packages, making the build process easier and empowering users to extend the included set of programs, as Paul Blankenbaker explains in the release announcement: "The architecture for building an NST distribution has been completely redesigned and engineered.
Starting with this release, all system, network and security applications are now included as RPM packages. This allowed us to take advantage of the Fedora Live CD Project for spinning off an «NST Live» distribution. [...] With previous NST releases, it was difficult for users to add features and scope by compiling source code or adding new applications. Now one can simply YUM install their favorite applications via the command line or through the NST WUI."
Since this process of adding applications required a new set of capabilities from the live distribution, its root file system has been modified to support a writeable ramdisk overlay over the read-only DVD media. Also, to allow the users to make their changes persistent, one can now choose to install Network Security Toolkit to a USB drive, or even to a computer's hard drive. A boot CD has been created for computers that lack a DVD drive, which installs a minimal distribution and then builds the rest of the operating system on top, with packages retrieved from the Internet.
An interesting feature, in respect to the security experts that have to rely on many command line applications, is the addition of the "nsttraceroute" script, which takes the output of the traceroute utility and outputs a KML file that can be viewed in Google Earth, rendering visually the path that the network connection took. Two other utilities were added, "driftnet" and "tcpxtract", one capturing images from the network and the other documents. Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture has been extended by integrating ngrep and dsniff, and many other applications have been added to the distribution. All the previously included utilities have been updated to their latest version.
The developers have based the system on Fedora Live CD technology, which provides support for the use of RPM software packages, making the build process easier and empowering users to extend the included set of programs, as Paul Blankenbaker explains in the release announcement: "The architecture for building an NST distribution has been completely redesigned and engineered.
Starting with this release, all system, network and security applications are now included as RPM packages. This allowed us to take advantage of the Fedora Live CD Project for spinning off an «NST Live» distribution. [...] With previous NST releases, it was difficult for users to add features and scope by compiling source code or adding new applications. Now one can simply YUM install their favorite applications via the command line or through the NST WUI."
Since this process of adding applications required a new set of capabilities from the live distribution, its root file system has been modified to support a writeable ramdisk overlay over the read-only DVD media. Also, to allow the users to make their changes persistent, one can now choose to install Network Security Toolkit to a USB drive, or even to a computer's hard drive. A boot CD has been created for computers that lack a DVD drive, which installs a minimal distribution and then builds the rest of the operating system on top, with packages retrieved from the Internet.
An interesting feature, in respect to the security experts that have to rely on many command line applications, is the addition of the "nsttraceroute" script, which takes the output of the traceroute utility and outputs a KML file that can be viewed in Google Earth, rendering visually the path that the network connection took. Two other utilities were added, "driftnet" and "tcpxtract", one capturing images from the network and the other documents. Multi-Tap Network Packet Capture has been extended by integrating ngrep and dsniff, and many other applications have been added to the distribution. All the previously included utilities have been updated to their latest version.
Download Network Security Toolkit 2.11.0 right now from Softpedia.
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