Updating BackTrack
The BackTrack developers maintain a repository of the latest version of all tools contained in the distribution. You can update BackTrack tools from within BackTrack using the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). Here are three useful apt-get commands:
You can show all packages available, a description of each, and a version of each using the dpkg command dpkg -l. You can search for packages available via APT using the apt-cache search command. Here’s an example of a series of commands one might run to look for documents on snort.
root@bt:~# dpkg –l ‘*snort*’
dpkg shows airsnort 0.2.7e-bt2 and snort setup 2.8-bt3 installed on BackTrack 4 by default.
We can use apt-cache to show additional snort-related packages available in the repository:
root@bt:~# apt-cache search ‘snort’
The APT cache has the following package:
snort-doc – Documentation for the Snort IDS [documentation]
Use apt-get to download and install this package:
root@bt:~# apt-get install snort-doc
The package is downloaded from http://archive.offensive-security.com and installed. To find where those documents were installed, run the dpkg command again, this time with –L:
root@bt:~# dpkg –L snort-doc
Bingo! We see that the docs were installed to /usr/share/doc/snort-doc.
