EH-Net

I'm sure everyone here has set up a test lab in one way or another.  If someone were to have access to a multitude of OS's via TechNet or another legitimate means, how would you recommend configuring a test lab?

For example, do you even have a working test lab?  Do you configure one quickly to test a newly disclosed vulnerability?  How often do you test new vulnerabilities?

As far as the lab goes, there are numerous threads on EH-net about lab setups, etc.  One such, recent one:

http://www.ethicalhacker.net/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,54/topic,5479.msg28878/topicseen,1/#new

As far as setting up, the reason I, personally, have tons of VM's preconfigured, is to easily restore a clean machine from a VM backup, install software / configurations to test, and wipe clean, easily.  I rarely keep any given VM setup long.  Just save your barebones VM's (xp, xpsp2, xpsp3, RH, SLES, Ubuntu or whatever) and you can always reset pretty quickly.

I highly recommend getting a Technet subscription. I use that extensively.

After I perform a clean install, I typically take a snapshot. I may make one more after significant configuration changes (i.e. setting up a new domain, installing DNS, DHCP, etc.). That way I can always have a semi-usable network, but I still have a great deal of flexibility where I can test things quickly. I can always copy one of the clean installs, test whatever I need to, and then blow it away when I'm done with it.

Wow, don't know how I missed that one.  That's what I was looking to find out.

Thanks!

VMWARE is the way to go .

If you want to test a wide range of OS simultaneously I would recommend ESx 

Yeah, I keep getting torn between trying to convince the powers that be to let me beef up a server and use it for this purpose or avoid that altogether and just confiscate a few engineering workstations and put a couple VMs each.  Or just have static VMs powered down and boot them on my laptop when needed.

Actually I had an HP 350? G5 server about a year ago and put ESXi on it, but mistakenly used static sized hard disks for the VMs and ran out of space.  The VMs were being used as a test environment for an active project so I couldn't delete them and I wasn't given approval to get more disks.  After the project was finished the server got used for something else and I couldn't keep it.

Honestly speaking its all about money . The more you have the more you can invest on heavy servers and its maintenance including electricity charges  :) . People like me never had a chance to get heavy servers as other do . But still I divide my whole lab using my existing laptop and pc .

3.2GHz dual core , 1gb ram - PC
1.7GHz , 2 GB ram - Laptop .
Wireless Network .

Once you know how to tweak and tune things properly everything is set to go .
And I am pretty much happy with that .

Well, depending on 'needs and wants', you can acquire a pretty decent server for VMWare ESXi, to run on, off of eBay.  I picked up an HP DL380G3 (dual Xeon), with 16 Gb of RAM and 300 GB of storage installed, for under $500, and with ESXi being free (and supported on that hardware,) it was an easy decision to get it.  Sad thing is, and I'll let the seller and the company he acquired them from remain anonymous, the server arrived with administrative credentials (for their LDAP tree) still stored in the ILO configs and such, and those were easy to 'extract.'  Server was from a company whom, I'm certain, wouldn't have wanted those credentials to get out.  When I contacted them, they were very appreciative, and said they'd obviously be more careful about letting those things slip, in the future, as well as changing their passwords, ASAP.

Long story short, you can always find 'affordable' hardware, and sometimes, you'll even get a mini-adventure along with it!   :P

What do you have running?  Do you push all your VMs to like 128MB RAM or something?



Wow, that is a story I'll be sharing with my colleagues.  I just watched the HNN broadcast for May and they had a story about copy machines that customers didn't know had hard drives that kept a copy of everything scanned.  SCARY!

Well I dont do that way . By tweaking I meant that I not only play with VM images for emulation , also I do Cisco emulation using GNS3 and other devices . They include idlepc values and other stuff . However my 1GB PC machine is not that good for all that , I have been putting off my plan to install Windows 7 because of this hopefully I will be installing 1 GB more ram to make it 2 .

As far as this copier thing is concerned I heard that there is a hard disk attached to a copier and each time anything is printed it saves a copy

hxxp://www.codejacked.com/security-tip-photocopier-hard-disk-caches/

Yeah, the copy machine story is a whole other ball of wax...  Folks just don't realize all of the places that information is stored, and think of 'data security' solely in the sense of pc's, networks and servers.  Can be a grave mistake, especially for folks that have stringent compliance standards and federal regulations they need to meet.

Are you planning to run Windows 7 on 2 GB?  ???  If so, from my experiences, I'd expect some less-than-acceptable performance, if you're doing much more than general web surfing or text editing...