Geekspeak: October 8, 2001

Want to take advantage of some of the excellent open-source security tools but dont have a ready Linux system at your disposal? Well, to run Trinux, all you need is a 486 or better system, some memory and a floppy drive.

Trinux, the Linux Security Toolkit, is a compact version of Linux that runs completely in system RAM. To set up a Trinux system, I merely downloaded a boot image, created a boot floppy disk using free tools such as rawrite and then booted my system to the floppy. In my case, it took less than 5 minutes to have a fully functional Trinux system up and running.

To add applications to the system, I used the standard getpkg command, which would download the packages from the central Trinux server. Trinux supports almost all of the best security tools, including snort for IDS, a wide variety of sniffers, vulnerability scanners and encryption tools. Trinux also supports Web servers and several scripting languages.

Trinux itself is a very secure system. It doesnt include Telnet capabilities, so it must be administered locally or remotely through an SSH client using RSA encryption.

Those interested in Trinux can find it at www.trinux.org.