CDT507 - Computer Forensics
and Cyber Security
PREPARING THE LINUX HOST
Joram Kinuthia
University of Nairobi
Lecture 2
Recap
2
Course resources
Intro to digital forensics
Digital forensic analysis goals
Digital forensic process
Open source tools
Artifacts
Lab work
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Outline
3
Preparing the Linux Host
Ubuntu over view
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Linux Command line
4
cd changes directories. “cd ..” goes up a directory, “cd /”
goes to the top of the directory structure, and “cd ~” goes
to your home directory.
ls lists the contents of a directory (equivalent to “dir” in a
Windows command prompt). “ls” will list the current
directory, and “ls –1” will provide a verbose listing.
pwd will print the current directory you are in, in case
you get lost.
mkdir will create a new directory
cp will copy a file. “cp –r” will copy a directory and all
items in the subdirectory.
mv will rename (or, move) a file or directory
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Linux Command line
5
rm will delete (or, remove) a file. “rm –r” is required to
delete a directory (and all its subdirectories!)
cat will dump the contents of a file to the screen. Long
files can be viewed a page at a time using less or more.
The pipe character “|” is used to chain the output from
one command to the input of the next.
The greater than sign “>” is used to send the output to a
named file instead of the screen.
Double arrows “>>” append the output instead of
overwriting.
Finally, man and info can be used to get usage
information for any command.
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Linux File System
6
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Extracting Software
7
Linux source code is usually distributed in
compressed archives known as tarballs.
To extract these we will use the tar command along
with a handful of flags.
To extract tarballs with tgz or tar.gz extensions
(GZippped tarballs), use the
tar xzf {filename}
To extract tarballs with tbz, tbz2, tar.bz2, or tar.bz
extensions (BZipped tarballs),
tar xjf {filename}
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Installing Software
8
Install from the internet repositories
sudo apt-get
Also, can compile from source “building a system”
./configure
make
(sudo) make install
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Version Control Systems
9
These services enable tracking of code changes among a
distributed group of participants.
Version control systems offer many capabilities geared
toward ensuring clean and easy collaboration on
development;
For our use, we will only be “checking out” code—
retrieving a copy of the source code from the repository.
The end result will be a directory tree of code similar to
what we would have after extracting a tarball.
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Installing Interpreters
10
In addition to compiling executable code, we will
need to be able to execute programs written in
interpreted languages.
To do so, we will need to install the appropriate
interpreters—Perl, Python, and Ruby. On most Linux
distributions the Perl and
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Lab work
11
• Lab work – Install build-essential on your laptop (refer chapter 2 in course
text)
• Make short notes on popular open source version control systems e.g. git,
subversion, etc
•Lab work – Install Perl, Python and Ruby
•Install webmin
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