Deploying Kali over Network PXE/iPXE Install
Booting and installing Kali Linux over the network (PXE) can be useful from a single laptop install with no CDROM or USB ports, to enterprise deployments supporting pre-seeding of the Kali Linux installation.
We will cover three different ways of using PXE. The first way will be how to manually set up PXE with dnsmasq. The second will be a partially-automated way using Docker. The final way will utilize netbootxyz, which hosts the PXE files and uses a separate DNS server to properly direct computers. Please utilize the Table of Contents to quickly navigate to the method you want to follow.
Manually setting up a PXE Server with dnsmasq
First, we need to install dnsmasq to provide the DHCP/TFTP server and then edit the dnsmasq.conf file:
:~$ sudo apt install -y dnsmasq
[...]
:~$
:~$ sudo vim /etc/dnsmasq.conf
:~$In dnsmasq.conf, enable DHCP, TFTP and PXE booting and set the dhcp-range to match your environment (we are using 192.168.101.100-200). If needed you can also define your gateway and DNS servers with the dhcp-option directive as shown below:
interface=eth0
dhcp-range=192.168.101.100,192.168.101.200,12h
dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/tftpboot/
dhcp-option=3,192.168.101.1
dhcp-option=6,8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4With the edits in place, the dnsmasq service needs to be restarted in order for the changes to take effect:
Download Kali PXE Netboot Images
Now, we need to create a directory to hold the Kali Linux Netboot image and download the image we wish to serve:
Configure Target to Boot From Network
With everything configured, you can now boot your target system and configure it to boot from the network. It should get an IP address from your PXE server and begin booting Kali Linux.
Post Installation
Now that you’ve completed installing Kali Linux, it’s time to customize your system. The General Use section has more information and you can also find tips on how to get the most out of Kali Linux in our User Forums.
One last thing we need to do if we want to use this system in the future is set up a cron job to pull in the new Netboot images regularly in case of kernel updates. We will create a simple script for this purpose named pxe.sh:
We save this script to /opt and are sure to set it’s permissions so you can only edit it with root or sudo. An example of this is to set the file to 770 or 700 with chmod, and set it to root:root with chown.
We can now add it to a cron job:
Using Docker and dnsmasq to automate setup of a PXE serverDocker file and dnsmasq.conf
The docker file we will use looks like the following:
Before we can build this container we need to create the file dnsmasq.conf. We use the following options:
Launch Docker container
We run the following commands to create our Docker container. Please note --privileged=true and --network host is necessary for the port mapping to work properly:
Post-startup
Once booted and connected, we must run the following command:
We are now good to go!
Preseeding PXEPreseed file
We can use the following preseed file to automatically install our Kali instance. Be sure to change package selection, user information, region information, and hard drive to match what you are using. Alternatively, should you want to be prompted for any of those, just comment out the line:
Preseed integration to initrd
To incorporate this into our initrd to automatically run we must do the following:
Using netbootxyz to host our PXE files
To install netbootxyz we will follow the official documentation. Using this method will allow us to set up a server and use our existing DHCP server to point to it, rather than creating a new DHCP server.
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