HOWTO : Setup My Back|Track 5r3 Personal Supercomputer

My Hardware

CPU : Intel i7-3930K (6 cores, 12 cores with Hyper-Threading, Socket 2011)
Motherboard : ASUS SaberTooth X79
RAM : Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 32GB (4GB x 8)
Display Card : Inno3D nVidia GeForce GTX 590 384bit 3072MB DDR5 x 2
Hard Drive : WD SATA III 3TB
Power Supply : Seasonic X-series 1250W
Cooling : Water cooling system with EK products
Case : Lian Li PC-z70 (modified)

My Operating System

Back|Track 5r3 64-bit system as the host operating system for the captioned hardware.

My Problem

When boot up the Back|Track 5r3 and started "startx", the screen of the monitor will be black out. It is because I have nVidia display card in the system.

The only way to solve it is when booting up to the Back|Track 5r3, press "Tab" in the boot option menu. Then enter the following at the end of "text splash vga=791".

text splash vga=791 nomodeset

After that, the Back|Track 5r3 will boot up after entering the command "startx". Install the system as usual to your hard drive.

After the installation is completed, do not reboot the system. Edit the following file instead after mounted the partitions of the hard drive.

nano /etc/default/grub

Locate 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text splash vga=791"' and append the following :

text splash vga=791 nomodeset

and it will be looking like this :

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text splash vga=791 nomodeset"

Then execute the following commands :

update-grub
fix-splash

Reboot the system.

My nVidia and CUDA drivers

Install the nVidia current driver from the repos of Back|Track :

apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-current-modaliases nvidia-settings

After the nVidia driver is installed, execute the following command :

nvidia-xconfig

Now, it is high time to install the CUDA driver. Go to the CUDA Developer site and download the driver. Make sure you selected Ubuntu 10.04 version.

64-bit version :

wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/5_0/rel-update-1/installers/cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu10.04-1.run

32-bit version :

wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/5_0/rel-update-1/installers/cuda_5.0.35_linux_32_ubuntu10.04-1.run

After the download, make it the be executable.

For example :

chmod +x cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu10.04-1.run

Then, install it and follow the instruction on screen. Accept the default settings.

cuda_5.0.35_linux_64_ubuntu10.04-1.run

The last step for the installation is to set up the path of the executable files and libraries.

nano /root/.bashrc

Append the following line at the end of the file.

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/cuda-5.0/bin

nano /etc/ld.so.conf.d/cuda.conf

Add the following lines to the file.

/usr/local/cuda-5.0/lib
/usr/local/cuda-5.0/lib64

Then execute the following command and reboot afterward.

ldconfig

My Hash Cracking Power

We use oclhashcat+ to test the performance of the cracking power of this hardware.

cd /pentest/passwod/oclhastcat+
./cudaExample0.sh
./cudaExample400.sh
./cudaExample500.sh

If you can see the hashes are cracked, the CUDA is setting up properly.

My Addtional Softwares

This host is for hashes and passwords cracking. The penentration testing work will be doing on virtual machines.

I will install virtualbox, sysinfo, shutter, synaptic, gtk-recordmydesktop, and sensors-applet to enhance the function of this host.

By the way, I need to fix the minor bugs of the Back|Track 5r3.

Bug #1 :

There is no sound since Back|Track 5.

mkdir /root/.config/autostart
nano /root/.config/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop

Add the following lines to the file.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/pulseaudio
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Pulseaudio
Comment=Start Pulseaudio

Bug #2 :

Wicd cannot connect to D-Bus since Back|Track 5.

dpkg-reconfigure wicd
update-rc.d wicd defaults

That's all! See you.