Metasploitable3 has been around for quite a while and has been used by professionals, students, and researchers alike to improve their skillset. This has improved a great deal over the previous generation Metasploitable2. With new exploits were coming out out every day, the community needed something more where you dont get satisfied with straight-forward to play environment to get a high privileged shell.

I tried building this automatically several times as posted on Github , but it failed mostly when vagrant uses up the /tmp space (where i allocated ~1.5GB).

If you face this issue, replace the instruction posted in the manual install section at step 2 with

$ TMPDIR = /var/tmp packer build windows_2008_r2.json

and continue with the rest of the steps. It takes around 10-15 minutes to finish and once ready , you are greeted with

As this is a trial license of Windows Server 2008 R2 , you may want to read the wiki page for Windows Product key and Tips and Tricks for building a persistent VM.

I shall be writing a Metasploitable3 walkthrough soon. Your feedback is welcome. 

Metasploit often throws an error that its database cache is not yet ready and will continue using slow search.

To fix this issue, ensure postgresql is started and check status

$ sudo service postgresql start
$ sudo service postgresql status 

Re-initilaize msfconsole and rebuild the database cache

$ sudo  msfdb init
msf> db_rebuild_cache
msf> db_status

The search should be ready now

If this doesnt work, try the following command to re-establishing the database connection to complete the trick

msf > db_connect -y /usr/share/metasploit-framework/config/database.yml