My lab

Over the years as I've needed to learn something new I adopted a process: immersion. With this I immerse myself in a given subject area, obsessively completely, until I feel I know as much as I can. For this revisit into infosec I have been using that process but I need a laboratory to do this in. So... I'm building a lab and here's my first post on it.

The plan is to keep it cost effective so I will be purchasing nearly everything used off eBay. When I've learned enough to be pissed at the gear being slow or not doing something, I'll upgrade it, until then, eBay it is. At the same time I need the lab to be representative enough of the real world for security testing to have some value so I recently purchased (2) Dell R1950 servers. They have the following config:

• 2 x 2.6GHz quad-core Intel XXX CPU's
• 48GB RAM
• 4 x 300GB SAS disks
• 2 x 1GB ethernet

Because I want to be able to test against multiple operating system targets, I will run CentOS 7 and use KVM to virtualize. The Intel CPU's on the 1950's I have are about the bare minimum to do hardware virtualization but it works. I'll RAID4 the 4 disks and end up with something like 900GB of useable space which should be fine for some VM's. I figure with the 8 cores and 48GB of RAM I'll be able to run 6-8 VM's at the same time (1 core, 4GB RAM).

For network I'll be running 2 Cisco 3750-X switches, old but working and will run layer 3. One will go in the basement of the house which will become my "server room" and another will go on the ground floor where my desk/couch/router/wifi are at. I'll connect them together with some short fiber optic cables so I can run a pair of 10GB links in an EtherChannel. To feed the upstairs part of the house I'll likely use a Wifi bridge built from a Raspberry Pi.

And that's the basic setup I'm starting with, more to come as I install CentOS on the Dell machines.

Kali 2.0 sources.list file

I finally had a chance to sit down and verify which apt repo's should be added on a Kali linux machine. I came up with the following so things like python3-system-properties would install. Note that python-system-properties HAS been renamed to python3-system-properties.


Here's my /etc/apt/sources.list

################################################################################
#
# /etc/apt/sources.list
#
# Kali 2.0 (2017.1) apt repo source file
#
# run apt-get update after making changes to this file
#
################################################################################

deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib

deb http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib
deb-src http://old.kali.org/kali sana main non-free contrib