Ghiro Appliance Building

All started with us thinking about a way to provide users with the simplest and fastest method to test or deploy Ghiro, some users just want to give a try or deploy their infrastructure with no pain in few minutes, and we like challenges.

The game was achieving an plug and play “box” with:

• Few requirements or no requirements.
• The ability to use the appliance building technology in a continuous integration system to be used in developer’s daily testing.

After evaluating some technologies, the winner was a conventional “virtual appliance”, because it requires only one virtualization software (i.e. Virtualbox, Vmware). I love docker but it is more demanding.

Packer was the framework used to create, starting from configuration files and script, a brand new Ghiro Appliance running the latest development release from GitHub.

The appliance building script is open source and available under a project dubbed ghiro-appliance on Github.

To play with it you have two options:

1. Get the latest stable appliance, the appliance running the latest stable Ghiro, from official Ghiro website.
2. Create your own development appliance, using the latest Ghiro development release

If you are a Ghiro hacker or you just want to live on the cutting edge of image forensics, you are going for the second option for sure.

Creating a new Ghiro appliance from scratch is quite easy:

• Download and install Packer.
• You must have VirtualBox installed and access to internet (to download Ubuntu’s packages).
• Check out  ghiro-appliance repository and run:

$ packer build template.json

You will see packer run an create the Ghiro appliance: spawn a Virtualbox machine, run the initial setup, reboot, and install all software required.

It can take more or less 30 minutes depending on your system performance and internet speed.

Now you will get an .OVA file ready for use! For more documentation just have a look to ghiro-appliance README.md and Ghiro’s documentation.