New Debian Based Distro

TelemetryBox is a new distro out there, based on debian. It has a few interesting features. You can run it live from CD to test things out without touching your hard drive, and boots up (apparently) full configuration (via webmin) over a browser. It also claims to have "...network diagnostics, X and complete gui, E-mail server, list server and firewalling functionality all bundled together for easy installation" (blatently ripped from this debian planet story).

Read on for more of my tale....

I'm currently waiting for telemetrybox to finish installing under vmware, but I have played with their system running from CD. It has some problems, like being unable to configure X as the XF86Config is a symlink to a file on the CD, and no idea where the webmin link is. The default web page has some interesting things built in though, squirrelmail, mantis (bug tracking system) and mailman are all there built right in. They also have a nifty configuration system to do pretty much all the config right in the browser. This includes (as advertised) things like ACID, nessus, snort, netsaint, ipaudit, a port and ip scanner using nmap, with the ability to dump results right into nessus' config, and other nifty stuff.

They have some problems in the vmware drivers, so I had to fake out the webserver by adding the IP as "testbox.telemetrybox.org" in my hosts file before it would recognize the admin user properly, but after that happened, it was much easier to deal with. End result, it's woody with a nice admin interface, but still worth a look, if only to be able to mess about with nice preconfigured stuff :)

Posted by Arcterex at June 09, 2002 12:12 AM