Tips and Tricks

This page contains some tips and tricks for building and using Metasploitable3. These come from various gotchas that we've encountered or seen brought up in the community.

Build Tips

• The build process uses a trial of Windows 2008 R2. This trial is only valid for 30 days and at that point will start displaying messages about activation. Once the trial expires you will see a popup when the VM is booted, and the VM will power itself down after 1-2 hours of use. To work around this you can try the following:
• Add a valid Windows 2008 R2 license and activate Windows.
• Remove the box from vagrant with vagrant box remove metasploitable3 and then build it again using packer with packer build windows_2008_r2.json, and add the new box to back to vagrant vagrant box add windows_2008_r2_virtualbox.box --name metasploitable3. This starts with a fresh installation of windows so it only resets the timer for another 30 days.
• If vagrant has any errors for the provisioning process it is best to do a vagrant destroy and then vagrant up again to start from scratch. Vagrant will attempt to start from where it last left off if there was an error. The scripts in the Vagrantfile require some dependencies and if those don't get installed properly scripts further down in the provisioning process will not function correctly. If you continue to encounter errors running vagrant up please open an issue.