Just turn it off

Oh the frustration of using an Azure Labs virtual environment. Firstly, it takes about five minutes to spin up your environment before you can begin remoting to your space. Then, it’s slower than a wet week and your virtual machines run in Windows that are clearly based upon vga monitors; yuck!

I have been working away on my final assessment for the third unit of my Master of Cyber Security, Network Security. I’d initially worked in my own virtual machines at home, however there was an issue that stopped something in the assessment working, so, I started from scratch within the School’s Azure environment. Thankfully, having already worked away I was able to quickly reestablish myself and resume things, and writing hours I was now at a point I had completed a majority of the assessment tasks.

I paused my Kali and Ubuntu Linux virtual machines and turned my environment off for the night. To my horror tonight when I went to add additional elements and test Kali had a problem with resuming; what the! At home it never has problems resuming, but here it shits itself. I was forced to roll backwards meaning the generated private and public keys were subsequently lost, however when I regenerated them Kali wouldn’t connect to Ubuntu any longer. OMG!

I did eventually get there by regenerating the key, then recreating its pass phrase, and manually transferring the public key to Ubuntu. Needless to say tonight I have shut down both virtual machines completely.

Separately, I had been attempting to extend Cowrie with Kippo-Graph, a tool to allow review of honeypot logs, however its roadblock after roadblock due to Ubuntu using a new version of Python which Kippo-Graph didn’t like. S someone coming from macOS, I really find Linux quite a pain in the arse to deal with, it feels so dated with its dependencies systems rather than just abstracting it and pulling all required items in by default. Get the feeling I’ll need to look beyond kippo.