In February, we’ll look at some purpose-built Linux distributions available for the Raspberry Pi.
Our January meeting was devoted to two projects. First we discussed how my fuel oil tank gauge had failed in testing. When the transducer head of the distance sensor was located in the pipe, the distance registered was the distance from the transducer to the end of the pipe. If I lowered the transducer so it was located below the end of the pipe, the distance reading was the distance to the oil. Since the meeting I’ve thought about how this problem might be overcome. Stay tuned.
Following that discussion we looked at Kali Linux (kali.org), a Linux distribution aimed at security (penetration) testing. My initial installation of the 32-bit version on a Raspberry Pi B+ was way too slow even for just a peek, so I downloaded and installed the 64-bit version that runs only on the Raspberry Pi 2. The download and installing it on a microSD card took about ten minutes. When it booted up, this version proved much faster. To see something work, we ran a network scan using Nmap, a very useful network administrator (or hacker) tool. Nmap can scan a network or a single address looking for machines at each address. It can then scan each machine looking for open ports. The resulting report often shows an amazing amount of information about the scanned machines.