Alright, well... Here we go I guess?
I've been wanting to build my own HomeLab for years, and now that I have plenty of time on my hands due to an indefinitely delayed West-Coast move, and an empty house except for 2 anxious puppies, why not?
I want this lab to be an all-encompassing Cybersecurity lab for sharpening my skills and continuous learning. I want to include Red Team, Blue Team, Penetration Testing, Web Apps, Docker, Kubernetes, Development, Analysis, Reverse Engineering, Threat Hunting, Intrusion Detection, CTF's, Mobile, VulnHub, annnnnnnnnnnnd I'm sure I'll add more when/if I remember. I have no idea how it's going to look at this time, nor do I know yet what sorts of extra hardware I'll need to purchase to supplement what I already have.
As a bonus, maybe I'll start to graduate from script-kiddie and improve my automation game with some coding. I forgot how many times I've attempted to START trying to learn how to code, but it always ends with me naturally gravitating back to one of my other hobbies out of frustration and wanting to be comfortable again. Now, with the power of Adderall immense focus, perhaps now's the time to harness this energy towards something resume-building, educational, time-consuming, wallet-shrinking, and spouse-angering since she will likely wonder just what in the double h-e-double hockey stick am I doing all alone in my office all day. Love ya, but I gotta hack. It's what I gotta do!
UPDATE: As with most projects this one has evolved over time to include not just a playground, but my entire home network set up. I've only made my wife upset a certain number of times that remain <10 but unfortunately still >1. I'd say that average is pretty good.
Will I have enough resources? Heck I don't know, I'm making this up as I go. I will be scouring Amazon, Save My Server, Newegg, PCPartPicker I guess, eBay duh, and a few other places to search for deals that don't sound too jank sketch like the one refurbished absolute monster of a server I found for only $75.
...tempting, but no...
Yes, I considered it. Times are hard.
So far, Amazon appears to be the most promising with some of the best deals I've seen. They even have plenty of seemingly honest reviews that slightly boost my confidence it would be a good choice.
Servers I'm considering:
- Dell PowerEdge
- Enterprise Proliant
- ...and that's about it for now.
Of course whichever machine I get is going to be beefed up enough in order to host all the machines I want, and it will be virtualized with Proxmox. No license purchases here, no Sir.
After that the real fun starts. I absolutely can't wait to stupidly mess up the entire environment and then frantically try to fix it, but inevitably make things worse through spastic troubleshooting and desperation. It's all in the name of bettering myself and learning, right? Even if it degrades my health? Hell yea.