Throughout your cybersecurity journey you will learn about different technologies. Being able to create and work with these technologies will be easy to do with a home lab. Without the practical hands on skills you will not be able to piece together what your learning during your studies. I started my home lab in 2017 and continue to expand on deploying various projects. Cybersecurity has to be one of your hobbies, passions and learning objectives. Curiosity plays a important role here and it may be one of those attributes you have to dig deep and search for. Asking questions, breaking things, trying to fix things and learning how these technologies work will help you along the way.

Let’s start with the basic questions to answer:

What will you need?

Will I need to spend a lot of money?

What if I get stuck?

What will you need?

Time. This is one of the most import things to be aware of. Time is one our most valuable resources. Unfortunately we never get it back and we just get older as it goes by. Don’t worry, age is not a issue here. If you have the willingness to learn you can succeed! I have spent countless hours trying to get things to work, researching, learning and building. Often times spending my midnight tinkering with different technologies, this usually did not make for a great conversation with my wife the next morning but that is where mutual understanding come into play.

Hardware. You will need a couple old computers to start out with. These project we will create can be deployed in a cloud based environment and we will touch on a cloud based home lab in another post. What I started with was an old laptop, some refurbished Dell Optiplex machines , a managed switch and some Ethernet cable.

Drive/Motivation. It will be difficult, it will drain you, your brain will be fried and you will fail. This happens. It happened to me and still does. I have worked on projects for weeks almost to a point where I wanted to give up. This should not stop you or prevent you from succeeding. Whatever is blocking you, you will have to learn to break through these walls and persevering though the difficult task. Cybersecurity does have to be a big part of your lifestyle. If you do not like continuous independent learning and researching you will fail in this field. This does not mean you have to sacrifice your sanity or your health, I would never want anyone to sacrifice the most important things to them, but you will want to fit and incorporate cybersecurity in your lifestyle.

Will I need to spend lots of money?

Ah money, something we have to have and one of those things we do not like wasting…well for the majority of us. You may or may not have to spend money, this really depends. Recycled hardware can be obtained for free if you know where to look, sometimes people /organizations will give stuff away for free and this is your opportunity. Even if they say its broken, most of the time we as technology enthusiast we can easily fix it. Here are a few items I started out with:

• Dell Optiplex 9020 – As of today, the price can vary from 75 dollars and up. What I did was actually just buy the listings that included cases and motherboard. This was during my first degree in computer maintenance so I wanted to be able to build these systems. I purchased 3, one as my everyday desktop and two for testing purposes. This was ideal since I get a better deal by purchasing more. Now this was in 2017, pre COVID. Prices look to have went up tremendously since then. If you already have daily windows or mac system you can get away with just getting one, two would be better. Also you will not need the windows operating system since we will be installing open source software on these systems.
• Dell Optiplex 3010 – Same deal as above, we don’t need to start off with high specs, these systems can always be upgraded later. The 3010s will be cheaper and can be found for as low as 40 dollars with cosmetic damage. I do recommend starting with one of these first. Ideally we want a system that will be capable of acting as a firewall/router using pfSense. The 3010’s have 4 PCie 2.0 slots and of course one onboard Ethernet connections. This will potentially allow us to have 5 network interfaces. (I currently use all 5) 🙂
• StarTech Network Interface Cards – These can be usually found brand new for around 15 dollars. I would suggest these over the USB Ethernet adapters just because of the price factor. They are fairly easy to install in the 3010s and I have had mine running for years with no problems, plug and play makes it easy as they are compatible with pfSense drivers. I would recommend at least getting one extra Ethernet connection rather it is USB or a NIC.
• Netgear Managed Switch – another eBay listing. You can find a switch like this today usually ranging from from 15 to 50 dollars depending on the model, condition and number of ports. 5 ports is sufficient.
• Ethernet Cables – I would recommend getting this in bulk if you have the patience and skills to make your own cables. But you can also find these pre-made and various lengths for you needs. Also ask people you know, most people kept these things lying around after the jump to WiFi :). Expect to spend 5 to 30 dollars on pre-made variations.
• Raspberry PI – These are fun and very useful. I was lucky enough to invest in a few before covid, it seems like they are harder to come by and prices have increased. I will have a few projects that we can build, I like to use them for wireshark, snort and tcpdump.

What if I get stuck?

Most likely this will happen. Especially dealing with technologies that update frequently. Sometimes the guides we find are out of date and before you know it you will have 50 browser tabs open. Fortunate for us, there is a huge community and most likely someone has already been where you are. Google will be your best friend or whatever else search engine you prefer. One of the most important pieces here is , don’t give up if you get stuck, take a break, enjoy your family or other passions and come back to it. There has been countless times where I got stuck , came back to the project after some time and found a solution. Our brains do get tired and we can easily become mentally exhausted.

We will continue build this Home Lab out in upcoming post, These are the minimum suggestions you will want to get before we move forward with building our home lab.