Hack Lab #4 - Setting up Dradis for Tracking Hacking Activities

I have been using Kali Linux for a while since I started doing the OSCP labs.  Up to this point I had always used KeepNote to maintain my notes on what I did to what boxes and what I found in the labs.  However, I am now going to use Dradis to keep track of the same material.  I am doing this to ease the development of reporting - Dradis is capable of creating reports from its database.  This is going to be interesting since I have not used this tool before.  I have been playing around with it for a couple of days so I have a lot of junk in the database.  Since you are limited to one "project" at a time in Dradis-CE (community edition) I went on a hunt to find some way of being able to keep separate "project"s.  When I get back into the OSCP labs again, I want to keep separate databases of the exercises, the lab notes, and the challenge notes.

I was able to find a set of commands to reset the database at https://dradisframework.com/ce/documentation/reset.html.  I found out that using the following command

 "bundle exec thor dradis:reset"

while in the Kali Linux directory /usr/lib/dradis, I could reset everything and have a backup of what I had put into the archive.  So this led to a plan to keep things separate; I just have to remember to output a report of my findings before separating items out.  The sequence of steps is as follows:

1. reset the database with "bundle exec thor dradis:reset" in the /usr/lib/dradis directory; note the backup file in a README file in the /usr/lib/dradis directory, what it contains and the date.
2. change the .xml file that is used for initial project setup
3. create a new project using the .xml file
4. do what you do; take notes, add attachments, etc.
5. perform periodic backups of the data, in case of system failure
6. when complete, or at various times during the note taking, put out a report
7. finish up with a database reset (#1 above) and start over

I may come back and update this information later.