The Network Security Toolkit is designed provide a large assortment of tools that run entirely in RAM. A primary goal of the project was to provide a bootable ISO image that anyone could try booting without fear of having the contents of their hard drive modified.
Because of this basic design decision, the Network Security Toolkit requires a fair amount of RAM. Here are the minimum system requirements.
Table 2.1. Minimum Requirements
| Component | Minimum | Recommended | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Celeron | i686 | It will NOT run on a Intel 386, Intel 486, or Intel Pentium class CPU. It is known to work on the Intel Celeron (466MHz) and above, Intel Pentium II (266MHz) and above, AMD Athlon, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon XP, AMD Opteron, and AMD Athlon 64. |
| RAM | 128MB | 256MB | The minimum amount of 128MB is only enough for basic applications. If you want to run X, snort, or any serious set of applications, you will want at least 256MB of RAM. If you have Linux swap partitions available and don't mind having the Network Security Toolkit make use of them, you can use the laddswap command. |
| Motherboard | - | - | The Network Security Toolkit should work on any motherboard which is supported by Fedora Core 4. However, some newer motherboards have components which we don't have the drivers for. You typically get a kernel panic at boot time in this situation. |
| Ethernet | 0 | 2 | Technically, you could use the Network Security Toolkit without a Ethernet card installed. However, it wouldn't be of much use for networking. Two (or more) Ethernet ports are strongly recommended allowing one to be used for general access to the Network Security Toolkit and the other(s) to act as a probes to monitor network traffic (stealth mode). The drivers included on the ISO may or may not support the Ethernet devices in your system (some of the newer motherboards have Ethernet devices which don't work). |
| CDROM | 24X | 52X | It would probably work on a 4X CDROM, but the access time would be painfully slow. The NST will boot from an externally connected USB CDROM drive if your BIOS permits it. |