[framework] Metasploit on Windows

[Luke J]

It might be easy for me to say, since I have never needed to use
metasploit on windows, but I would certainly not be opposed to the
decision, especially if it is significantly draining resources.

Just my opinion,

Luke

H D Moore wrote:
> Hi everyone, 
> 
> We have been struggling to properly support Windows since the early days 
> of 2.0. Cygwin has done a decent job so far, but software 
> incompatibilities and Cygwin version mismatches have caused a ton of 
> problems for some of our users. The Cygwin installer requires a ton of 
> disk space and is a huge drain our bandwidth (+100Gb/mo). 
> 
> With Metasploit 3, we wanted to provide a native Windows version of the 
> Framework. There has been little progress on this front, due to the main 
> user interface (msfconsole) depending on libreadline and libreadline 
> being a broken mess on Windows.
> 
> In the last year, there have been a number of free virtualization 
> environments available to the public. VMWare has released VMWare Player 
> and VMWare Server, Microsoft is giving away copies of VirtualPC, Xen is 
> becoming more popular, and VirtualBox has released their source as GPL. 
> Both Intel and AMD have virtualization features built into their latest 
> processors and the new version of Windows Server will support native 
> virtualization. On the distribution side, BackTrack (from 
> remote-exploit.org) is really kicking ass and provides a ready-to-run 
> environment for both version of the Framework.
> 
> So, given the stability issues with the Metasploit Cygwin release, and the 
> wide availability of free virtualization software and OS images, would 
> anyone mind if we drop support for the pre-packed Windows installer of 
> the Metasploit Framework?
> 
> If we go this route, we will still support Metasploit running on top of 
> Cygwin, but we will not support Cygwin itself or offer a pre-packaged 
> Cygwin environment. We may offer custom live CDs or virtual machine 
> images for download, but these would not be immediately available. Our 
> current documentation (hah!) for using the Windows version will become a 
> list of methods for loading up Metasploit in a virtualized environment.
> 
> If you think this is a horrible idea, keep in mind that the technically 
> adept can still install Metasploit into their own Cygwin environment, and 
> that the less adept will be able to download ready-to-run virtual machine 
> images sometime in the future. 
> 
> Please reply with your opinion on this (good or bad), we realize quite a 
> few people depend on the Windows installer.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -HD
> 
> PS. Yes, we still plan on releasing 3.0 "soon" :-) With any luck we can 
> have the final release completed  in February.
>