Home Lab

pinkydapimp

Anyone out there have a home lab? If so what do you have? I passed my CISSP and am thinking of putting together a home lab of sorts.

Thinking about a ASA 5505 and/or Cisco 881 ISR. Any thoughts? Really, i want to play with IDS/IPS.

Thanks.

the_hutch

Well first off, congrats on your CISSP. Have you worked with SNORT at all? Definitely a good place to start for IDS...and its open-source.

I have a fairly elaborate home lab set up.

- 4 desktop computers
- Two laptops
- 2 commercial routers
- A blade server for my virtual machines (MS SQL Server, Win7, Win XP, Ubuntu Server, Apache, Backtrack 5, Win Server 08, and probably a few others that I can't recall off the top of my head).
- 2 TBs of pre-generated rainbow tables (NTLM, LM, MD-5, and WPA-PSK).
- A 1 TB ISO and file-storage server.
- A Cisco chassis with 3 redundant power supplies, and integrated cisco enterprise router, 24 port 10/100BaseT Ethernet switch and a 24 port fiber switch (needless to say, I have a lot of unused ports) ...also, I'm not sure the exact models of the switches and router off the top of my head...I'd have to look.

pinkydapimp

Thanks! I havent worked with SNORT but i will check it out. That is quite a lab. What did that run you?

the_hutch

Honestly didn't run me much at all. Right place at the right time. A local high school was upgrading their network and were clearing out their old equipment. The Cisco chassis with router and two switches was $30. Blade Server was also $30. Got desktops for $7 a piece. And one of my laptops I got for practically nothing too. A friend of mine told me he bought a new laptop because his was broken. I told him I'd give him $20 sight unseen. Turned out, the power supply was bad and that was the only issue. I use technet for my licenses, so $300 a year. And a couple hundred for storage drives. Altogether, I've probably only spent $600-$700.

JDMurray

You can play with a lot of security software on a single computer using VMware Player (free) or Workstation (pay) to run multiple virtual machines with BackTrack 5 (free) and Windows (pay). VMs can monitor and attack each other over their virtual network. If the computer you use has lots of RAM and a big processor, you can run lots of VMs for more complex scenarios. Lots more information on this in our Virtualization forum.