TechScrawl.com

Here are a few helpful tips related to BackTrack 3 configuration. The first two are only useful if running BackTrack installed on a HD or running in a virtual machine. These are all slightly different enough from the Linux administration I’m used to (Suse, Red Hat), that I thought they deserved documenting.

1) Enable secure shell daemon to start automatically

chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd

Simple as that. It took a bit for me to figure out (after editing the rc.M file), that the sshd init file was already being called by /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 (which was being called by rc.M). The above command makes the init file executable. On the next boot, the SSH daemon will start.

2) Configure adapter for static IP rather than DHCP

This is what I did:

vi /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1

Added this:

ifconfig eth0 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default gateway xxx.xxx.xxx.x
echo “nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” >> /etc/resolv.conf

I also commented out the entire ‘for’ loop that runs the DHCP process. I don’t think this is the 100% best answer if you have multiple interfaces and want DHCP to work on one of them, but this worked for me. It seems changing the settings in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf doesn’t work.

3) Connect to a WPA / WPA2 wireless network

vi /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Change the ssid & psk variables to match your environment, both need to be in quotes. For WPA2, change the “proto” variable to RSN and make sure “group” only contains CCMP & TKIP. Save the file.

chmod 755 /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

wpa_supplicant -w -Dwext -iath0 -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

dhcpcd ath0

If you have problems with getting an IP address, delete the contents of /etc/dhcpc then try again.