RE: Laptop Considerations

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To: <pen-test@securityfocus.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:07:08 -0500

The Marine Corps Assessment teams uses two types the Blue teams use a Dell
Inspiron 9100 for doing assessments with XP Pro load and VM Red Hat Linux.
We use Knoppix for doing wireless assessments. Our Red teams uses the Dell
Latitude D600's because they are lighter but with the same configuration. I
use a Dell Inspiron 8600 which is a lighter version of the 9100 series. We
stated with the dual boot OS but found it to cumbersome and sometimes the
NIC card hangs on an OS. So we switched to Single boot XP (very locked down
XP) and use Linux on VMWARE which is much better. We get to use both types
of tools at the same time.

Hope that helps.

Gregory (Greg) S. Dreelin
Senior Systems Analyst
Marine Corp Information Assurance Assessment Team (MCIAAT)
gdreelin@edsicorp.com
540-720-0841/0843/2093 /2106
Cell 703-843-1962
__________________________________________________________________
'Information is Knowledge, Knowledge is Power, and Power is Dangerous"

-----Original Message-----
From: Kris Wingard [mailto:kwingard@synergisticusa.com]
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 10:20 AM
To: pen-test@securityfocus.com
Subject: RE: Laptop Considerations

I highly recommend the Latitude D600. I work for a consulting company,
and all of our engineers use that model. You're right about the ports,
it is so crucial to have parallel/serial/USB in this line of work, and
the latitude comes standard with all of them. The built-in wireless
works great. As you probably know, Dell has great warranty support
if/when you ever need it. I'd say go for it man, you know they'll have
great driver support for years to come, so you'll also be able to
rebuild with any OS and not have to worry about finding a driver out on
the wild web to support your hardware.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Bouchard [mailto:lists@tigercomputersolutions.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 10:47 PM
To: pen-test@securityfocus.com
Subject: Laptop Considerations

I am about to be purchasing a laptop and I was wanting the advice of the
list. I know this can be a very personal topic for some people, but I
have
to throw it out there anyway.

Here's my situation...I'm about to be attending a degree program in
Information Assurance and Forensics. I also have my own business doing
a
variety of things computer related. At some point I would like to delve
more heavily into vulnerability assesment, penetration testing, and
possibly
forensics. I'm looking for a laptop that will be flexible enough to
meet
all these needs.

This is what my immediate plans for the laptop are: for my business, I
need
to have some of the basic MS Office suite on it, as well as MS
Publisher. I
plan on making it into a dual-boot machine with some flavor of linux. I
don't care to use a live linux CD because I want to be able to store
logs,
settings, and other data onto the drive, and I hope to eventually use
linux
for everything except the MS stuff that I have to use on occasion for my
business.

Because of the variety of things I plan on doing, I want to get one that
has
a serial and a parallel port in addition to the USB that they pretty
much
all come with now. It would be nice to have at least one PCMCIA slot as
well. I plan to do some wireless network assessment, so it needs to be
wireless capable, but for my purposes being able to attach an external
antennae for extra range isn't that important.

What I'm looking at right now is the Dell Latitude D600. I've supported
and
purchased a lot of Dell desktop computers and have been very happy with
them
and I have run Knoppix-STD on a Dell laptop and everything ran well.
The
D600 has the ports I'd like.

Any thoughts or recommendations? Any capibilities that you think I've
missed?

Thanks,
David

• Previous message: Marco: "Re: Research on penetration testing?"
• In reply to: Kris Wingard: "RE: Laptop Considerations"
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