I get asked a lot about how to create a home and what hardware is required?
The truth is you don’t need to start out here is a pic of my home closet super duper data center ….its not a data center lol
Here it is in all its glory my Lab
I have done alot of work to reduce the amount of physical devices that I have instead I have a single high specs desktop with a couple of managed switches a seperate desktop PC which acts as my “edge firewall) – SOPHOS UTM
I have a Cisco router ( Cisco 1841 router)
Gigabit Desktop switch ( Dlink not sure of the model)
Cisco managed switch ( For VLAN seperation) I highly recomend a managed switch
My Main PC has the following hardware specs
CPU- AMD bulldozer 8 core
RAM – 32G
HDD 1 128GB SSD ( for main OS)
HDD 2 2TB mechanical WD drives ( for VM’s and data)
3 – Wired NIC’s
1 Wireless NIC ( For wireless attacks)
I have a few hardware based firewalls from various vendors for testing ( Not required )
I used to have big rack mount servers loud as hell but found that I could scale down with much more power on comodity hardware remeber your not running a production enviroment so having normal PC compnets is absolutley fine
The Setup
While my setup changes alot based on what I am doing I normally have my network setup with multiple vlan’sto seperate my home network traffic with my lab traffic
My server connects to all of the networks some of the networks I have segeragated from the internet those networks I use for malware analysis
I have another network for attack traffic that is on a seprate network switch and NIC to the server so when launching attacks I can still manage the server and not knock down my whole network.
I use virtualbox and vmware to virtualize all of my servers and GNS I use to virtualize my routing and switching however I do more with the servers than network labs
For the wireless NIC its just a USB wireless dlink NIC that supports monitor mode for things like aircrack and other wireless labs
To setup the actually software and settings from the LAB well thats based on what you want to do my LAB is able to handle everything that I need it for
If you need more help and advice on building you lab reach out to me I would be glad to help you out !