Network Backtrack

Logging in to BackTrack

Once the installation of BackTrack is done, the default username and password required to log in are root / toor.
NOTE: You will not be able to see the password as you type it.

Starting a GUI Environment

After you are logged in you can start the GUI Environment by issuing the startx command.

X wont start!

In rare occasions (such as after a VMware tools install, or when using unsupported Video cards), X will refuse to start. If that happens you have several options you can try in order to fix the issue:

• Reconfiguring the X server package, you can reset (and often fix) Xorg configurations with the following command:

   root@bt:~# dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

• If you are using Backtrack 5 on x64 with KDE you should try the following:

   root@bt:~# rm /root/.kde/cache-*

NOTE: Sometimes you may need to also remove the cache folders in /var/tmp by issuing the following command:

   root@bt:~# rm -rf /var/tmp/kdecache-*

Getting Networking to work

If you haven’t noticed yet BackTrack does not boot with networking by default in order to increase its stealth.

Setting your IP manually

We will first set up the networking manually. In the following example we will assume the following addresses and their purpose:

   IP Address      -  192.168.1.112/24
   Default Gateway -  192.168.1.1
   DNS server      -  192.168.1.1

In order to set these up we will run the following commands:

root@bt:~# ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.112/24
root@bt:~# route add default gw 192.168.1.1
root@bt:~# echo nameserver 192.168.1.1 > /etc/resolv.conf

Getting a static IP to stick between reboots

These settings however will only last until you reboot, so if we want to save them between reboots we need to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file like this:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). 

# The loopback network interface 
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.112
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.1.0
        broadcast 192.168.1.255
        gateway 192.168.1.1

Edit the file as appropriate, then have the network come up automatically at boot time:

root@bt:~# update-rc.d networking defaults
root@bt:~# /etc/init.d/networking restart

Getting an IP from DHCP

In order to get an IP from a DHCP server we can issue the dhclient <interface> command as follows:

root@bt:~# dhclient eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.1.1


Listening on LPF/eth0/00:0c:29:81:74:21
Sending on   LPF/eth0/00:0c:29:81:74:21
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.1.112 on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.1.112 from 192.168.1.1
bound to 192.168.1.112 -- renewal in 37595 seconds.
root@bt:~#

Using the script to start networking

There is a script to start networking in the /etc/init.d directory which attempts to start every interface listen in /etc/network/interfaces (you can remove the ones you don’t need). To start it issue the following command:

root@bt:~# /etc/init.d/networking start