Booting and Connecting to the NST WUI

The first task to accomplish is to boot the Network Security Toolkit (NST) system.

If one has downloaded and burned a ISO image to a CD, one can boot the Live CD version of the NST as follows:

If one has downloaded and extracted the NST Virtual Machine, one should be able to boot the NST within a virtual machine in the following manner:

Regardless of which boot method you choose, if you've followed the steps above, you should now find yourself at a command prompt. Run the command "ifconfig eth0" and look for the IP address next to the "inet addr:" label. If things go well, you should see something resembling:

Figure 1. Determining the NST IP Address

Determining the NST IP Address

The IP address for our test run (shown above) is "192.168.0.42" (yours will most likely be different). We will use this address in a web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox) to connect to the NST by specifying a URL of "https://192.168.0.42/".

A Common Mistake

A common mistake is to specify "http" instead of "https" at the start of the URL. If your web browser fails to connect, make sure you specified "https://192.168.0.42/" and not "http://192.168.0.42/". The NST only accepts encrypted connections from external machines.