Friday, February 6, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Security Lab Part 1
As a result of current economic times, I find myself still searching for employment. Having extra time on my hands is one of the reasons I started this blog. Another project I am am sinking time into is the rebuilding my security lab. My goal for my lab is to have a platform for security research so I can keep my current skills fresh and learn few new things.
It has been awhile since I have had an active security lab. The last form my lab took was that of a GenII Honeynet based on tools and process I learned from here. Back then I had a net block of static IP addresses through my SBC DSL service, so the networking was easy. Now, I have AT&T U-Verse which is very fast but I lose my static addresses. Another issue to navigate is that the service terminates to a 2Wire 3800HGV-B Gateway rather than a plain DSL modem. In addition, I have various LinkSys routers and hubs.
The next consideration is hardware. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of random pieces of hardware that desperately needed to be sorted through. Out are the Pentium p90 generic desktop, pIII generic server, Dell 4200 PowerEdge refrigerator/server, and pII Compaq Presario desktop. I kept Dell Dimension 4100, HP Pavillion Pentium 4, and my Sun Ultra 5. A very nice addition to my lab is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with two Quad Core Xeon processors running VMWare ESX. Virtualization is definitely an area of growth in the data center and is now a key part of my SecLab.
As for software, I plan on using mostly Open Source tools. I am also open to testing commercial applications and devices. Vendors can contact me directly in this regard.
My next update I will detail how I end up putting all of this together....
It has been awhile since I have had an active security lab. The last form my lab took was that of a GenII Honeynet based on tools and process I learned from here. Back then I had a net block of static IP addresses through my SBC DSL service, so the networking was easy. Now, I have AT&T U-Verse which is very fast but I lose my static addresses. Another issue to navigate is that the service terminates to a 2Wire 3800HGV-B Gateway rather than a plain DSL modem. In addition, I have various LinkSys routers and hubs.
The next consideration is hardware. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of random pieces of hardware that desperately needed to be sorted through. Out are the Pentium p90 generic desktop, pIII generic server, Dell 4200 PowerEdge refrigerator/server, and pII Compaq Presario desktop. I kept Dell Dimension 4100, HP Pavillion Pentium 4, and my Sun Ultra 5. A very nice addition to my lab is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with two Quad Core Xeon processors running VMWare ESX. Virtualization is definitely an area of growth in the data center and is now a key part of my SecLab.
As for software, I plan on using mostly Open Source tools. I am also open to testing commercial applications and devices. Vendors can contact me directly in this regard.
My next update I will detail how I end up putting all of this together....
Greetings all
I suppose all blogs have to begin somewhere and this is my beginning. First off is to introduce myself.
I am Charles Tholen. I currently live in Texas with my wife and two daughters. My career has involved working in IT, IT Consulting, and Software companies. For the last 13 years I have worked for various software vendors as a sales engineer in Anti Virus, Disaster Recovery, Systems Management, Security Information Management (SIM/SIEM), and Identity Management/PKI. This has given me the opportunity to work hands on with many Forture 1000 companies as they work through the challenges of security and compliance. Next, I guess I should explain what my blog will be about.
This blog will generally discuss issues, news, research, opinion, and speculation of topics relating to Information Security technologies. My intent to keep content fresh and maintain a dialog with my readers. Look for several posts a week.
As I make this jump into the blogsphere, I hope to use feedback from my readers to help shape the content and provide intelligent debate and discussion.
I am Charles Tholen. I currently live in Texas with my wife and two daughters. My career has involved working in IT, IT Consulting, and Software companies. For the last 13 years I have worked for various software vendors as a sales engineer in Anti Virus, Disaster Recovery, Systems Management, Security Information Management (SIM/SIEM), and Identity Management/PKI. This has given me the opportunity to work hands on with many Forture 1000 companies as they work through the challenges of security and compliance. Next, I guess I should explain what my blog will be about.
This blog will generally discuss issues, news, research, opinion, and speculation of topics relating to Information Security technologies. My intent to keep content fresh and maintain a dialog with my readers. Look for several posts a week.
As I make this jump into the blogsphere, I hope to use feedback from my readers to help shape the content and provide intelligent debate and discussion.
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