Personal lab at work

I just thought of this but has anyone brought in their own equipment to be able to lab?
I have extra equipment to lab on but it might be sold later on. Mostly because we need the money

I can VPN in from home and everything but I don't have my own place yet.
I'm thinking about doing wireless with UniFi, since we use it at work.

I know for a fact that they're not going to be like 'oh since you have your own stuff here we can use it'. The reason I know is due to personal development and they're not really paying for it but for electricity.

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Comments

ITSec14

If it was me, I would at least get written permission first and clarify what you intend to do. These kind of requests can sound the alarms within a security team.

Cisco Inferno

Yeah and make sure they dont see you labbing instead of working.
Labbing "for" work is usually accepted if you isolate it.

LordQarlyn

Well we have a lab using spare switches (unfortunately our network doesn't use routers except at the gateway), I have no problem with my guys practicing and learning during down time.

TechGromit

We have plenty of spare switches, so setting up an isolated lab isn't an issue, but there are no spare routers.

jamesleecoleman

I'm pretty much the jack of all trades here. The labs will be focused on what I do here at work. There are some things that I need to get better at and I would like to do more server, networking, wireless and security stuff. Even though I do it already. I just need to be able to be more self reliant on what we use here and how we do things.

I will get talked to for 'trying to figure stuff out' because of the personality type that I'm dealing with and they don't understand how things work in/with IT and InfoSec. Nor will they want to understand. SMH.

pevangel

For small companies, you might be able to get away with it. At a company I used to work for, I've brought my own equipment and racked them in the lab. I wanted to keep them on at all times, but I didn't want to pay for the electricity to do so. I even hooked up a terminal server to them so that I can console to them from my desk or remotely through the corporate VPN. I made them available to other engineers though if they wanted to study for certs.

jamesleecoleman

Yea, my last job wouldn't let us do that. We had to get permission to put stuff on the network and that took a long time just to get an answer back. Shoot, even trying to replace SOHO wifi stuff took months just to replace because they wanted me to try EVERYTHING before I got a new one.

I think that I can for sure work something out.

TechGuru80

You can VPN into rogue equipment you setup at work? Sounds like a really bad security setup to me.

pevangel

No VPN to rogue equipment. The terminal servers are part of the lab environment, and it's just a serial connection from there to the console port of my equipment. There is a lab firewall that only allows access to the terminal servers for a specific group of people. Outside of the terminal servers, everything else in the lab are air-gapped.

EANx

Make sure you get an ownership acknowledgement in writing. Last thing you want is to get laid off and not be able to get your stuff.