Building a Home Lab

Basics of building a home lab

Introduction

Building a home lab can seem daunting at first glance but with a little setup, it can be straightforward and help you gain skills in each of our toolsets. Below are the required materials and setup steps for an introductory home lab. Yours does not have to look like this, it's only one example of a basic setup.

Required Materials

  • Hypervisor

    • VMWare Workstation

    • Hyper-V

    • VirtualBox

  • Virtual Firewall

    • PFSense

    • OpenSense

    • PaloAlto

  • ISO's of tools you want

    • Windows 10

    • Security Onion

    • Ubuntu

    • etc

Steps for Building a home lab

Below are the steps for building a basic home lab. The image below is what we will be replicating.

Diagram of Home lab
  1. On your hypervisor, setup your internal virtual network

    1. On VMWare Workstation, go to Edit -> Virtual Network Editor

    2. Select "Add Network"

    3. Change the IP Subnet and Mask to be an internal IP (10.1.10.0/24 for example)

  2. Create your Virtual firewall with two network adapters. One that is set to bridged (Receiving an IP from the internet) and one set to your internal virtual network. Refer to PFSensefor more information on how to set this up.

  3. Once your virtual firewall is setup, make sure your LAN is set to the internal network and your WAN is set to the bridged network

  4. You are now free to build any virtual machine you want utilizing the internal virtual network. Give these VM's an IP in that subnet and it will be able to reach the outside.

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