If you transfer qcow2 images very frequently across OpenStack Clouds or between KVM and Openstack environments, they can quickly grow larger. Luckily qcow2 image size can be decreased to reasonable values using qemu-img tool. During image conversion the empty sectors are detected and suppressed from the destination image. Below we present how to shrink Openstack/KVM qcow2 image.
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Kali Linux (formerly known as BackTrack Linux) is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution designed for advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. Kali Linux contains dozens of tools targeted towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security Research, Computer Forensics, and Reverse Engineering. Kali Linux is a multi-platform solution, accessible and freely available to information security professionals and hobbyists.
Kali Linux can run as a bare-metal server, can be booted from a live CD or live USB, or it can run as KVM virtual machine or OpenStack instance using qcow2 image.
Below you can purchase ready to use Kali Linux OpenStack / KVM 64bit qcow2 images. There are two types of image:
| image name | image size | metapackages |
|---|---|---|
| Kali_2022.1_Xfce_OpenStack.qcow2 | 3.0 GB | kali-linux-core + Xfce |
| Kali_2022.1_Xfce_KVM.qcow2 | 2.9 GB | kali-linux-core + Xfce |
Image details:
Note: by purchasing and using this software you accept our Terms and Conditions
Have you ever wondered if the server you bought at the hosting provider is in fact a dedicated server or just a VPS and what is the underlying virtualization environment your server runs on?
virt-what provides us the ability to detect if we are running in a virtual machine or on bare-metal (real hrdware). virt-what detects common types of virtualization: hyperv, kvm, openvz, qemu, virtualbox, vmware, xen, etc…
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nmap (Network Mapper) is an open source tool for network exploration and security auditing and a powerfull port scanner. It can be used locally on localhost as netstat alternative, but it’s main use case is to scan remote hosts for open ports, system type, running services, etc…
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Some Linux distributions (for example: RedHat) have aliases configured in the system, especially for root user, which modify basic command line operations like: cp, mv by adding “-i” parameter to prevent user from accidental overwriting or deleting files (interactive mode). This can be disturbing, especially when we are dealing with many files at a time. To get rid of this issue we can modify aliases in the system to disable interactive mode.
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The administration of the large-scale production cloud environments requires the management of dozens of customer’s virtual servers (OpenStack Instances) in the cloud on the daily basis. Manual configuration of the multiple newly created Instances in the OpenStack cloud at a time would be problematic for cloud administrators. Luckily, OpenStack is equipped with metadata service cooperating with the so-called cloud-init script, which together do the magic of automated Instances’ mass configuration.
Metadata service runs usually on Controller node in multi-node environment and is accessible by the Instances running on Compute nodes to let them retrieve instance-specific data, like IP address or hostname. Instances access metadata service at http://169.254.169.254. The HTTP request from Instance either hits the router or DHCP namespace depending on the route in the Instance. The metadata proxy service adds Instance IP address and Router ID information to the request. The metadata proxy service sends this request to neutron-metadata-agent. The neutron-metadata-agent service forwards the request to the nova-api-metadata server, by adding some new headers, i.e. Instance ID, to the request. The metadata service supports two sets of APIs: an OpenStack metadata API and an EC2-compatible API.
OpenStack Snapshots can be utilized to backup Instance before some critical changes are made on Instance OS or to migrate Instance to the new OpenStack Cloud.
In this tutorial we will create snapshot from existing Instance to launch it in different Cloud, but you can also create snapshot just to backup the Instance and restore it’s state later in the same Cloud, if needed.
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