I Don't Remember INetSim Being This Complicated
I mentioned on my post from last week that I’m migrating over to VMWare from Virtual Box due to a weird issue with getting Windows VMs running. Since I finally figured out how to get VMWare actually installed, I started recreating my malware lab.
After getting my REMnux box set up and spending the three fucking hours it took to set up FlareVM, I followed the instructions from HuskyHacks for setting up INetSim. I made the changes in the config file, I changed the DNS server on my Flare box and typed in my REMnux box IP in chrome. It worked!
Then I tried typing in google.com. No dice. I tried facebook.com, msn.com, and of course pshef.work, and none of them gave me the default INetSim page. Not only should that have worked because they’re real websites, but it also should have worked because INetSim should be resolving every domain name regardless of whether or not it exists.
I tried, in no particular order and excluding all the swear words:
- Reinstalling REMnux
- Reinstalling Windows
- Trying Windows 10 (since my original Flare was in Windows 11)
- Split tunneling my VPN so VMWare was considered outside my VPN
- Trying different VMWare network adapters
- Trying different settings for the network adapter
- Crying and begging
Unfortunately, none of them worked. And every guide I found online that talked about INetSim was in reference to Virtual Box, not VMWare.
This saint pointed out the fix (and a good recommendation). The fix being, of course, that not only did I need to change the DNS server’s IP, but I also needed to change the Gateway IP to being the same as my REMnux box/DNS server!
Lo and behold, everything worked as expected again. `
(And the good recommendation was to leave the network adapter not connected to the host.)
So far, I feel like VMWare is making everything take one or two extra steps longer which means spending a lot more time figuring out what those one or two steps are supposed to be. Honestly, if it wasn’t for VirtualBox having issues with Windows VMs I’d probably switch back over because this shit is a pain to deal with.
And while I’ve found that Hyper-V is extremely user-friendly, I still would prefer to use Virtual Box over both.