OSCP basics

[sudohunter]

Hi All,

I am planning to start OSCP preparation and I have gone through the forums and I have basic question may be it seems silly but I would like to know.

what is the recommended or best practice to use the OS in the machine(Laptop/Desktop) which will be used for OSCP exam

1. Is it good to have windows OS and Kali as VM

2. Kali itself on on the machine

Which will help more or we cam most out of it

Thanks

[digip]

When you sign up for the exam, you will receive links for downloads. All of this will be bundled and you should receive a VM with the videos and course materials(at least, thats how it was in the past under PWB). You can definitely use windows to help, and a home lab as well to test, but you will be logged into the Offsec student VPN to a network where you will be attacking various machines and OS's though your Kali VPN to the network. your base OS can be whatever you want but needs to be able to run the Kali VM. You could however roll a native install and copy over the VPN files, but I would recommend just sticking with the Kali VM bundled to you for stability and being able to snapshot and save your progress in case you need to revert or break your system during the exam. No fun having to reinstall and start over. Kali is more or less bleeding edge and updates can make things wonky at times. For example, I updated 2016.1 to 2016.2, and gdm desktop broke for me on my VM(which I think is more a common gnome bug with certain GPUs). I ended up installing KDE so I didn't have to backup and reinstall fresh and could keep all my stuff how I wanted other than the WM. The download though should come with an updated enough version to do everything you'll need to do in the test, but having a VM makes it nice to keep things working if you write your own tools or try installing things not in the repo that can break things on you. Always snapshot your VM before you make major OS changes or updates so you can revert if things go south.

Just my 2 cents...

[sudohunter]

Hi Digip,

 

Thanks for your valuable input., One other thing I have query is that I have installed the Kali Linux and it is not taking the Wifi and I am using NAT as the network interface within the VM Player and my query is that if I use the NAT will that affect to the VPN they provide , My understanding is that the VPN client will on my host machine currently I have windows 10...

 

Thanks a gain for your valuable inputs

 

[digip]

Are you sure your wireless USB card is compatible with kali? If you're on a laptop, with built in wireless, VMware can't see the wireless card unless it's an external USB, or you're piggybacking off the hosts connection that's already established, in which case, you won't have control of things like monitor mode and wifi sniffing capabilities. I'd say try wired connection from the machine first, make sure you can get online. If you can, then troubleshoot the wifi, which may require you get a compatible wifi USB network card.