paranoid-ghidra

Installation

1. Install Terraform
2. Make Digital Ocean API token available to Terraform

   export DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN=insertokenhere

3. [OPTIONAL] Capture more verbose Terraform logging:

   export TF_LOG=TRACE
   export TF_LOG_PATH=$PWD/terraform.log

4. Modify variables in terraform.tfvars file
5. Initialize Terraform (e.g., download necessary plugins)

   terraform init

6. Output what will happen when you run terraform apply

   terraform plan

7. Deploy Droplet (execute plan)

   terraform apply

8. Run SSH port forward command (connect_cmd from terraform output)
9. Download TightVNC and only select TightVNC Viewer (VNC client)
10. Connect to localhost:5901 using TightVNC Viewer and randomly generated VNC password (vnc_pass from terraform output)
11. If, for some reason, the VNC session is not working as expected, simply restart the runvnc service on the Droplet:

    # SSH into Droplet using generated private key and IP address:
    # ssh -i <private_key> root@<droplet_ip>
    systemctl stop runvnc
    systemctl start runvnc

Why?

For those who need a template for running software like ghidra on anything that's not your machine.

How?

Through the magic of Terraform and VPS providers (in this case, Digital Ocean)

Issues

For some reason, provisioning the original bootstrap shell script via Terraform doesn't properly initialize and configure the VNC session. Connecting to it results in an unusable desktop session (gray screen). Manually SCP'ing and executing the bootstrap script directly on the Droplet works just fine. I've attempted to resolve this by:

1. Provisioning an expect script; and
2. Providing the bootstrap script as userdata (commands to execute during Droplet initialization)

Unfortunately, both of these approaches failed. To account for this, I've automated the creation of a systemd service to facilitate management of vncserver.

Pro-Tips

• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F to enter/exit full-screen mode in TightVNC Viewer

TO-DO

• Automatically determining the user's current resolution and providing that value to the resolution variable.
• Add support for KDE and "generic" VNC sessions