Baslinux mailing list

["Carl Reaburn" <carlreaburn AT attech.net.au>]

> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Carl Reaburn wrote:
>
> > I have a block of ip's running through my BL3 machine now, thanks to all 
> > of
> > you guys.
> >
> > I want to scan the ip's to see if they are secure.  Sites like grc.com 
> > will
> > scan the IP your surfing from, but not your gateway ip.
> >
> > Is there a site I can input an ip into?
>
> I've used grc.com and it scanned the gateway, seeing its address as the
> one I was surfing from. This is on a Freesco router, which also uses
> ipfwadm, so I'm not sure why my experience with it is different from
> yours.

I have a block of IP's.  The block is forwarded though my modem with one Ip 
set as the gateway.  Another IP is nat routed through IPcop for general 
surfing on my network.  The others are being used in the virtual machines. 
As far as I can see, I cant access the grc webpages from the virtual 
machines assigned the ip's I want to scan.  I also cant scan the IP assigned 
as the gateway of my modem to make sure it is not showing any available 
connections.

I cant scan from one IP to another as it will be treated as friendly traffic 
by my router.

It's all terribly confusing, highly experimental, and probably violates a 
dozen routing regulations.


> There are lots of online scanning services, so a google search
> should get you plenty of results. Then, there's the Nessus program that's
> made specifically to scan ports and find vulnerabilities. You seem to have
> access to a Windows machine, so, though Nessus was written for Linux it
> may have been ported to Windows and you might find and try running it on
> your Windows machine (just a guess that it runs on Windows).
>
> I'm curious about what you're up to. It sounds a little like one of my
> unrealized grand plans of trying to run a router/firewall in a virtual
> machine. Are you doing something like this with BL3? It would be really
> interesting to hear more about it if you are or, if you're not, what
> exactly you are doing.

Your dream has been realized thanks to M$ buying Virtual PC and letting you 
use more than one network card in each simulated machine.

basically I have a windows XP box with NO network protocols loaded at all. 
Just the hardware network card drivers, and virtual pc's driver.  there is 
no need for XP to even have tcp/ip loaded as it will not be talking over the 
network.  This also makes XP safe from attack as it will not respond to any 
packets sent to it, not even a ping!

If all works according to plan I will be able to feed a live IP into BL3 
running on Virtual PC.  BL3 will forward ports to other linux machines.
The other linux machines will also be running in Virtual PCs.  By enabling 
the virtual switch on the second network card I should be able to share the 
routed packets among the Virtual machines on the same NIC.  While turning 
off the virtual switch on the network card containing the live IP, should 
force all data through the firewall BL3 machine.

this would be a lot easier to explain with a picture. are attachments 
permitted?

When I am finished I should have one windows XP machine running:-  a 
router/firewall,  and several different domain names (each with a different 
live IP).  Each domain will have it's own virtual machine to run it's 
software.  Mostly synchronet bbs packages.  So I'll have several domains, 
web servers, mail servers, etc all running on the one machine.
The bonus of using virtual PC is that I can use ANY windows XP machine to 
boot up and run the servers.  No need to reinstall and configure for 
different hardware.

It also seemed like a cool idea to try out.  I wanted to do it years ago but 
Virtual PC would not support a second network card, which was a requirement 
for making a firewall.