Infrastructure Automation

This is a guide on how I use Packer and Vagrant to build my home labs

Lab Building Intro

Before I get started with all the wonders of lab building, it might appear my setup is a bit excessive that's simply because I absolutely LOVE lab building!!

Building a home lab is fun but at the same time is exhausting if you don't plan it out properly. Some reasons to build a lab are

• Media servers - Multi-room streaming or a centralized location for your music and movies and other goodies.

• Certifications - Studying for certifications and developing hands on experience vs simply being a paper boy/gal... no one likes paper boys/gals...

• Virtualization - Playing with the various HyperVisors such-as vSphere, KVM, HyperV, Xen, etc

• Practice Blue/Red team techniques

My primary purpose of building lab environments was to mimic an enterprise environment as best as possible so that my hands on experience was immediately useful as a sysadmin/network engineer.

My new purpose is to become a well rounded penetration tester with the focus on attacking active directory infrastructure.

Lab Building Advice

Identify why you want to build a lab and what you want to accomplish.

For me my lab environment is a mixture of production and testing. The production side is a primary firewall followed by a domain controller, wireless controller media server and personal Kali Linux box for CTF/HTB/Lab practice. The firewall has multiple VLANs for network segmentation and isolation. Can't have wifey's friends come to your house and access all your goodies, and you can't have them eat up your bandwidth either.. Watch your damn Netflix at home!

The lab testing side is where I have the flexibility to create various environments for testing purposes.

Purchase quality server hardware

I HIGHLY recommend going with older server hardware and Xeon processors mainly because it's incredibly cheap, reliable, resilient and scalable.

I DO NOT recommend going with typical consumer hardware such as Intel Core i3-7 and supporting motherboards primarily because

1. A majority of hypervisors don't work properly with this configuration.

2. Can be very costly esp. when purchasing modern equipment with DDR4 RAM

3. Most consumer motherboards cap at 32-64GB of RAM which kills scalability and the fun!

My motto is I rather have it and not need it then need it and not have it. Decide what works for you and start building it out on paper. The sky and your wallet is the limit 😁