First, some background – in a recent attempt to get a better handle on Internet privacy I began to look at various areas from mobile operating systems, browsers to the network I was connecting to the Internet from, and the various risks all entailed. In terms of my local network I was intrigued to better understand the “health” of devices on that network, and any risks they exposed.
I started to re-visit the use of Linux, and initially rediscovered Kali Linux “2016.2.” This proved to be a nightmare within a Hyper-V machine – a memory leak consumed all available host memory (12GB) in a couple of days, plus an “apt-get dist-upgrade” resulted in a failure of Xfce on boot… all I wanted was a vulnerability scanner, not a headache! Sadly, getting OpenVas running on Kali is very easy – see here.
My next port of call was Ubuntu, however, from a privacy perspective this proved less than ideal, so I opted for a distro I had not used for many years in its original form, Debian – specifically Debian 8, or Jessie.