24Mar/1030
Great Pen Testing Zipit Distribution from Adrian Crenshaw (irongeek.com)
I've been meaning to split this off into a new post for a while now. Adrian Crenshaw (irongeek.com) built a great z2 linux distro, specifically with the intent of pen-testing. You can grab it here.
It's not only a very cool distribution, (based on a modified rootnexus zipit distro), it's a very cool reminder of the great things we accomplish building off each other's work and sharing information. My only suggestion for his next release is to counter his assumption that metasploit won't be running at a useful speed on the z2. 
March 25th, 2010 - 12:53
I’ve had it on my zipit for about 2 weeks and been using/trying some of the build-in tools. It’s kinda hard to run them then wait for the processor to get caught up but for $40 have fun wifi tools there’s no reason to complain. Hopefully the Side-Track Zipit will become the very little brother to the BackTrack 4 netbook.
March 25th, 2010 - 13:29
Hey Chain,
Agreed! I think there’s a very cool niche that this fills and is a great compliment to backtrack. Glad to hear it’s running well for you!
March 25th, 2010 - 15:51
hey I just got sidetrack on my z2. has the keymap been altered? I am trying to use the percent (%) key for smbclient and the pdf I read says it is associated with the M key yet no combination has worked for me. anyone have a clue how to get % Thanks
March 28th, 2010 - 05:54
fracaspunk1: that pdf is one i made for my console keymap which doesn’t matchup with the X keymap in any of the debian based rootfs (aliosa27′s, rootnexus, sidetrack…). if you can run smbclient from the console (not an xterm) it should work. otherwise just look in the various keymaps (probably in /etc/X11) for the word percent and it should tell you what key it’s on.
March 28th, 2010 - 21:26
ok. I think I understand. bit of a noob, but learning. Thank you very much.
March 31st, 2010 - 15:19
Hey hunter I have a question. Do you know how I can edit the boot sequence for this or rootnexus userland? Ive been looking for the file with no look and cant find anything online that tells me where it is.
March 31st, 2010 - 16:20
Hey Linker42,
Sure. As they’re both based on debian, you can just edit the init.d, rc.local, runlevels etc just like a regular debian box. There should be some good howto’s posted up on ubuntu for example. Hope that helps! Good luck!
March 31st, 2010 - 20:08
I have a Q. I have my zipit Z2 with rootnexus’s userland as a base, and I don’t want to change, cause I have gotten it just about how I like, but I like the logging in as root like is in this one. How would I go about changing this to be root login? I tried changing inittab to make it a single user, but that just causes a freeze up. How would one do it?
April 1st, 2010 - 07:29
Hey Theredbaron1834,
You shouldn’t need to enable single user login to do auto login as root. I think you can just change your inittab to run /bin/bash instead of /bin/login etc. I’m pretty sure one of the old images had auto-login as root working so you may want to check that out as well. Good Luck!
April 2nd, 2010 - 23:26
Hey, i’m pretty new on this but, have you ever considered to use DSL ( damn small linux ) on the zipit??
April 5th, 2010 - 09:12
Hey link-fan,
DSL is a great distro yes, but is optimized for small installation footprint. The Z2 can have plenty of space on the micro SD card, and really is more optimized for small memory footprint. Also I’m not sure they have an arm port, x86 only. Could be wrong on that though, may be something to look into. Good luck!
May 5th, 2010 - 15:22
Hi all! Ive just got my zipit, and trying to shape it to my need. Ive installed the sidetrack userland, and now trying to install gcc on it. Previously I upgraded the system to the newest build, but now gcc has some conflict:
gcc: Depends: gcc-4.4 (>= 4.4.3-1) but it is not going to be installed
Recomends: libc6-dev but it is not going to be installed or libc-dev
Ive tried to install libc6-dev, but it depends on gcc and cpp, cpp depends on libc6-dev, and libc6 (already installed). Ive also experimented with apt-get install -f, but no success. So, got any ideas? Also what browsers do you use on your zipit? Ive installed links2 and midori. Is there a port of hv3 to ARM-based devices, or should I stick to dillo?
May 6th, 2010 - 09:12
Hey zdanee,
Glad to hear you’ve got your Z2 in and things are going. Have you done an apt-get update to the newest repository? It sounds like you’re stuck in flux between two versions of gcc and are running into dependency hell. Does ‘apt-get install build-essential’ yield any results? What is your current version of libc (you can execute /lib/libc.so.6 or /usr/lib/libc.so.6 to check). Hope this helps some, good luck!
As for browsers, I’ve had the most usable results from dillo links2, but midori works and firefox loads mega slowly.
May 6th, 2010 - 10:23
Hey! I’ve tried the apt-get install build-essential, but got the same results:
[...]
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
build-essential: Depends: libc6-dev but it is not going to be installed or libc-dev
Depends: gcc (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: g++ (>= 4:4.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages
I’ve run apt-get update the first thing after installing linux on my Zipit. Neither /lib/libc.so.6 nor /usr/lib/libc.so.6 present. I need gcc to build a dillo as well, so until then its links2 for me (midori is slow to load, reasonable after, kazehakase loads faster, but the interface cannot handle such low resolution well, iceweasel is a major pain, arora is about as slow as midori, and once I get gcc, Ill try out hv3, I expect a lot from that one).
May 18th, 2010 - 19:22
Just received my Zipit and want to know:
Where do I get “Side-Track” (the download link is dead)
Step by step, how to flash this little guy with Side-Track (have 8GB module)
My appreciation in advance… I’m a newbie but have been in the tech industry for 20+yrs
May 18th, 2010 - 20:38
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/zipit-z2-hacking-userland-side-track is still eorking for downloading
May 18th, 2010 - 22:02
Hey Steven_OHarra,
You can follow either of the previous guides for flashing the Z2. The pentesting distro is a userland distribution, so after you flash your Z2 you can just write it to an SD card and you’re good to go. Good luck!
May 24th, 2010 - 09:44
I unzipped the contents of the “first-sd” folder inside of “side-track-0.2″ to the root of a FAT16 4G card.
I put the mini-SD card in the zipit and rebooted, paper clip restarted,, even pulled the battery off/on.
I cannot get it to flash this brand new zipit. Any ideas? I’ve tried it with and w/o the pwr cable.
May 24th, 2010 - 09:49
Wow! just did the same thing with a FAT16 2GB SD and it worked!!!!!
May 24th, 2010 - 09:50
Hey Anon,
Glad to hear it was just your SD card holding you back. Happy Hacking!
May 24th, 2010 - 09:51
possibly a sd card that is too slow and you might be in the SAOD. did you set defaults from the stock app? that sometimes works if the card is borderline.
May 24th, 2010 - 09:53
oh and another thing is that until you have reflashed the zipit with a new kernel and rootfs it doesn’t handle sd cards greater than 2Gig well if at all.
May 24th, 2010 - 09:56
Actually that’s something someone somewhere should put into a FAQ somewhere. until you have reflashed your zipit you have to use a maximum 2Gig sd card, afterwards it’s a toss up if you can use a bigger sd card — some people report upto 8Gig cards working others have said no go
May 24th, 2010 - 10:19
Hey RK,
Good call! We should put this up on the SF wiki. That’s good info!
May 25th, 2010 - 17:47
Any overview (docs) on side-track to get started?
May 25th, 2010 - 17:51
Hey Steven,
There’s a good writeup of it on Adrian’s site over at irongeek http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/zipit-z2-hacking-userland-side-track, other than that I haven’t read any comprehensive guides on side-track the distribution, specifically. Hope that’s helpful? Good luck
August 11th, 2010 - 16:32
I have two questions:
What is this “distro” capable of? for example, can it crack weps?
And can do you have any link to the image, since the one on the oficial page is down.
Thanks
August 11th, 2010 - 16:34
Hey Pato,
Don’t happen to have a copy stashed myself, not sure if anyone else grabbed one?
/H
August 11th, 2010 - 18:17
pato:
you can find it here http://rapidshare.com/files/408660027/side-track-0.2.zip
August 12th, 2010 - 13:07
Tanks “rkdavis” If as sson as i download it i’ll make a mirror my self, so if anyone needs this…