i disagree,

liveCDs are tools, not OS's and should not be treated as such.  You'll learn faster building your own distro (in vmware if you wish) and working through the problems of installation (there really arent any anymore). You can be up and going in less than an hour.  In my life i have blown away more distros than i can count trying to install something with no documentation but i learned from it.  Just booting into a liveCD...its good to show someone "this is linux" to recommend they use that unless there is some extreme reason is not a good way to teach people what they need to know.

I guess if someone has never ever never seen or used linux then ANY liveCD would be ok to familiarize themselves.

as far as using security tools on BT first, having a ton of tools prebuilt for you teaches you nothing about:
1. installing and configuring those tools
2. why you even need those tools

There is something about the act of installing a tool yourself that forces you to think about why you are installing this and what are you going to use it for (especially if you have to go through dependency hell).  that helps more with understanding the methodology than just having that stuff installed for you.

your core tools that a "new person" will need will easily install from source or package management system.  As far as "have confidence that your tools are functioning correctly" if I install them myself i have confidence they work correctly.

Having someone or some distro do everything for you from the beginning does not set people up for success in working through problems on their own later...which is really what security is all about anyway.

if you need more proof then check out the remote-exploit forums yourself and look at the amount of basic linux questions that are in there, questions that shouldnt be there if people had the prerequisite knowledges that BT states you need before using their liveCD which is a good understanding of linux.

<insert learn linux before F*ing around with BT rant here>

both...all...whatever

linux to linux, linux to windows, windows to linux, windows to windos...etc

is the restriction based on just username or MAC? 

sounds like the simple answer is get yourself another username/password

i wasn't trying to be a jerk or start a cert war.  I just personally feel that if you are going to give advice you should either have experience in what you are giving advice on or other experience to make your advice valid (everyone can have an opinion regardless of experience).

I think silxp has since dropped enough information that we can google him and get a feel for his background which to me was wasnt apparent with the initial post in this thread.

you'll have to pardon my pessimism because we've had people talking out their ass on this forum before (not the case this time) and most people dont seem to have any balls to call people out.

can you follow that up with some advice to the original poster?

the advice of figuring out what you want to do first is good, but if you have an idea what industry you want to work in that will help too.

for example, if you want to do any kind of IA work for DoD you need your CISSP, that's just the requirement. 

as far as the CISM, if you dont meet the requirements you can still take the test.  You'll have to check out the ISACA page for details but you can be granted your certification and get your remaining years of experience afterwards.

that's some strong opinions about certifications you dont hold.

time to move?

looks like you know the answer to you own question.

if you posses the knowledge you say you do then i wouldn't take an junior level job.  That knowledge should be demonstrable on your resume to links to your talk on your personal webpage or out on the net.

I had an issue getting an old stick to boot, never did figure out what the problem was, it held data just fine, I even tried to format it.  I used a 2 GB scandisk cruzer like Kris pointed out and it works just fine.

the answer to your question is probably on the BT forum but any U3 drive will for sure be bootable even though any fairly new USB stick "should" work too

out in the sticks and doing pentesting at an affordable price would be a good niche to me 

what exactly is not working?

you are running it from something persistent yes?

the first time you run any msf instance, it will create the .msf directory in /root.  after that you should be able to add code and msf find it automagically

you know what security distro works great for me most days?


the one i installed, its got everything i need.