Not too long ago I was setting up a new pentest machine with Kali. Fairly straightforward a task, though slightly inconvenienced by the fact that the net was down at the time. No matter I thought, continue offline and all should be fine.. apparently not.

When you don't have a live net connection during setup Kali decides not to fill in the server details needed by apt-get to pull down anything more than security updates (no new tools for you!) Thankfully this is a simple and quick fix.

But how?

Having a look over at the Kali documentation we find the instructions and url's required. Basically we just have to..

• Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
• Add or ensure the following lines are present:

For general Kali repositories (aka everyone)

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali main non-free contrib
deb http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free

To use the source (aka Jedi's)

deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali main non-free contrib
deb-src http://security.kali.org/kali-security kali/updates main contrib non-free

And finally for those who like to live (and bleed) on the edge

deb http://repo.kali.org/kali kali-bleeding-edge main
#deb-src http://repo.kali.org/kali kali-bleeding-edge main

Now we update!

Once this is done (and saved) we can just do our standard

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

or

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Happy (ethical) hacking!