Sadly, my plans with my budget private cloud did not work out. Long story short, I moved internationally twice since I initially made plans to build that cloud. The first move was to Japan, and the second to Italy. Through each of those moves I lost two servers. On the upside, I have plans for the remaining three servers: a better home hacking and lab using Proxmox.

Designing a new hacking lab with Proxmox for learning and new courses.

After taking a year off I am back to making Pluralsight courses. I recently published Security Onion Basic Concepts and Functionality. I am currently working on a new course: Command and Control with Sliver. While creating the new course, I decided that I needed a better lab to simulate an actual network and make use of the Globomantics domain. Globomantics is a fake company Pluralsight uses for demos. I decided to take some old servers I had from a previous project, drew up a design for a potential network, and got to work. The design I came up with is below.

Hacking lab design in Proxmox. External network, firewall, DMZ, and internal network.
Proxmox hacking lab design

The design includes a firewall with separate internal and DMZ networks. The DMZ contains a vulnerable web server from VulnHub, a DNS server using Pi-Hole, and an email server running iRedMail. The DMZ is used because I want to keep the vulnerable hosts separate from the internal network. The internal network is a Microsoft Active Directory domain with a few workstations and a file server. I included one Ubuntu workstation as well that is joined to the domain. For security I have a firewall running pfsense and a Security Onion server acting as an IDS and SIEM.

On the external side I have a Kali Linux VM that is my main workstation for hacking, along with a phishing LXC running Gophish. I also have another Pi-Hole DNS server running that the internal network forwards requests to. This allows me to configure DNS records for fake websites without having to register actual domains.

Available Equipment for Home Lab

The three servers I have left are:

  • VMhost1: Dell Poweredge R610
    • 2x 6 core Intel Xeon processors
    • 16 GB RAM
    • 600 GB HDD
  • VMhost2: Dell Poweredge R610
    • 2x 6 core Intel Xeon processors
    • 16 GB RAM
    • 600 GB HDD
  • VMhost3: Dell Poweredge R510
    • 2x 6 core Intel Xeon processors
    • 16 GB RAM
    • 1.8 TB HDD

The biggest issue I will face is the available RAM with the amount of machines I plan to run. So, I will make use of Linux Containers (LXC) where possible to reduce the resources required for particular services. I should be able to use an LXC for DNS, email, and the phishing server because these services use fewer resources.

Additional Considerations for Network and Proxmox

  1. I am building this on a separate segment of my home network. It will remain behind a firewall, and none of the vulnerable machines will be exposed to the Internet.
  2. I am using Proxmox as the virtualization software because it is free and allows me to use features like software defined networking, clusters for management, and VM migration between hosts.
  3. I have limits on host performance due to using very old equipment. I will likely need to build a new host in the future to improve performance and reduce power consumption in the long term.

Ready to Build the Home Hacking Lab with Proxmox

For this build I am going to create posts about each step that serve as a guide for anyone looking to build something similar. The first post in that series will show the VMhost cluster and cover software defined networking installation.

Next: Install Proxmox and Configure Cluster