Metasploit mailing list archives
Metasploit on Windows
From: jk at electriccat.co.uk (James Kearney)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:50:31 +0000
I use both linux and windows, as I believe lots of linux users would admit. Linux is my pentesting environment, but for _some_ things windows is simply easier (<\end flamewar before it begins>). I would say the decision whether to continue windows support, really depends on HD / developers and where their priorities lay / how busy they are etc. - I personally would like msf to be continued on both platforms - because i use both. This is a purely selfish view obviously. (Yes i run vm's and dual booting machines etc). - I would not like to see developement of msf decline because too much time was taken in windows support though. - I believe supporting windows increases the popularity and availability of msf - which is a good thing. The decision is a balance between the popularity and availability of metasploit, which will be negatively affected by removing windows support, and the amount of time that will be 'wasted' that could be spent on other msf developments. Ultimately this choice is the dev's. But remember before you get on the purist *nix horse - just how widespread windows is, and how it might affect msf popularity. just some thoughts, kitkat
-----Original Message----- From: H D Moore [mailto:hdm at metasploit.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 6:23 PM To: framework at metasploit.com Subject: [framework] Metasploit on Windows Hi everyone, We have been struggling to properly support Windows since the early days of 2.0. Cygwin has done a decent job so far, but software incompatibilities and Cygwin version mismatches have caused a ton of problems for some of our users. The Cygwin installer requires a ton of disk space and is a huge drain our bandwidth (+100Gb/mo). With Metasploit 3, we wanted to provide a native Windows version of the Framework. There has been little progress on this front, due to the main user interface (msfconsole) depending on libreadline and libreadline being a broken mess on Windows. In the last year, there have been a number of free virtualization environments available to the public. VMWare has released VMWare Player and VMWare Server, Microsoft is giving away copies of VirtualPC, Xen is becoming more popular, and VirtualBox has released their source as GPL. Both Intel and AMD have virtualization features built into their latest processors and the new version of Windows Server will support native virtualization. On the distribution side, BackTrack (from remote-exploit.org) is really kicking ass and provides a ready-to-run environment for both version of the Framework. So, given the stability issues with the Metasploit Cygwin release, and the wide availability of free virtualization software and OS images, would anyone mind if we drop support for the pre-packed Windows installer of the Metasploit Framework? If we go this route, we will still support Metasploit running on top of Cygwin, but we will not support Cygwin itself or offer a pre-packaged Cygwin environment. We may offer custom live CDs or virtual machine images for download, but these would not be immediately available. Our current documentation (hah!) for using the Windows version will become a list of methods for loading up Metasploit in a virtualized environment. If you think this is a horrible idea, keep in mind that the technically adept can still install Metasploit into their own Cygwin environment, and that the less adept will be able to download ready-to-run virtual machine images sometime in the future. Please reply with your opinion on this (good or bad), we realize quite a few people depend on the Windows installer. Thanks! -HD PS. Yes, we still plan on releasing 3.0 "soon" :-) With any luck we can have the final release completed in February.
Current thread:
- Metasploit on Windows, (continued)
- Metasploit on Windows news-letters (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows myx at amex.ro (Jan 19)
- Metasploit on Windows Jim Starke (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Nicolas RUFF (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows bambam (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Tim (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Angelic Solutions (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Tim (Jan 19)
- Metasploit on Windows L.vd.Eijk at mindef.nl (Jan 17)
- Metasploit on Windows Ali Rizvi (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows James Kearney (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows M.o.H.a.J.a.L.i (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows James Kearney (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Krpata, Tyler (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows ken (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Pusscat (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Rodrigo Dutra Salvalagio (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Daniel Guido (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows Angelic Solutions (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows H D Moore (Jan 18)
- Metasploit on Windows bambam (Jan 19)
- Metasploit on Windows Daniel Guido (Jan 18)