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....