The last time I talked about the home lab, and this phase, I was talking about failure. And then the lab project went on a short term wait, until I could afford a box. Which was why I had posts about other things.

This weekend I was able to order the Lenovo ThinkServer TS140. I got the i3, 8 gig, 1 TB option. Right now it’s running a live cd of Xubuntu just to get some burn in time. Next I’m hoping to install ESXi / Vsphere on it. I know 8gig isn’t a lot of space for VMs, but I hope to upgrade to 32 gig on my next pay check.

Plans for VMs – these are temporary, heck this is on my existing network.

• Security Onion, with an Xubuntu base. Don’t like Gnome or Unity.
• Pfsense, I’m being impatient can’t afford hardware I want. (squid proxy and ssl vpn, why not).
• Alienvalut OSSIM
• wiki server of some kind (I’m going to store notes about the lab, and troubleshooting things on there)
• RT for ticket tracking (maybe intergrate the OSSIM or Sec Onion into it)

Not sure what else will make it to this box any time soon.

It is nice to have a box that I can dedicate to using as a lab device again. Hope to get more use out of it than the lasts couple. Not that they didn’t get used, just not used enough. I did write my Linux Hardening talk using both of those boxes though.

Who knows, maybe this will come in handy for something else I want to do…