Boot Matrix

NST Boot Comparison Table

The NST system is capable of being booted in many different ways. The following comparison table shows what features you can expect depending upon how you boot your NST system ("Yes" is used for positive attributes and "No" for negative attributes).

Feature	Live	Persistent	Movable	Fixed	Virtual Live	Virtual Fixed
Device
Install	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
Updates	Limited	Limited	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes
Password Retained	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Wireless Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Persistence	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
No Overlay	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Compressed FS	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
System Relocate	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes
Inline Tap	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	Yes	Yes

Header Definitions

Live

Booting from ISO image on DVD or USB drive without a persistent overlay.

Persistence

Booting the NST ISO image from a USB drive with a persistent overlay which periodically fills up and must be cleared.

Movable

Full NST hard disk installation to a external drive which can easily moved from system to system.

Fixed

Full NST hard disk installation to permanent internal disk drive.

Virtual Live

Booting the NST ISO image within a virtual environment (such as VMware).

Virtual Install

Full NST hard disk installation running within a virtual environment (such as VMware).

Feature Definitions

The following explains the meaning of the row headers that appear at the left side of each row in the Boot Matrix comparison table.

Device

The device used to boot the NST distribution from.

Install

Able to perform a full hard disk installation after boot.

Updates

Able to fully use the package manager to perform system updates and add additional software packages to the system (ie yum update and yum install). While all NST boot mechanisms support the use of yum, if you are booting a Live NST system (even if using the USB overlay feature), you have to be very careful when managing packages as you will consume resources quickly.

Password Retained

Indicates if the password is remembered between boots (if "No", then you must run the nstpasswd command after each boot).

Wireless Tools

Able to access wireless cards and run wireless tools like Kismet.

Persistence

Able to persist (save information) directly to the NST file system between boots.

No Overlay

This will be "Yes" if you don't have to manage a overlay area. It will be "No" if the persistence mechanism fills and needs to be periodically cleared (reset to the initial system state) at the boot prompt.

Compressed FS

This indicates that the file system is compressed. While a compressed file system may add a bit of additional CPU load, it reduces the storage space requirements and increases the effective throughput on slower I/O devices (like DVD media and USB disks).

System Relocate

This indicates that the NST system can be run on one system to collect data, then shutdown and booted on another system to use the analysis.

Inline Tap

NST Virtual machines can be run "inline" on the system they are installed on. This means that they can be configured to monitor all of the network traffic of the host operating system as well as other virtual machines running on the system without the addition of any hardware.