What kind of lab, machines you have for your security testing?

[MadmanTM]

i am curious about the various equipement security practitioners have for testing.

my setup, main dell m1710 xps laptop,
dell latitude c640 for pen testing and linux backtrack.

optiplex with 8gb of ram, quad xeon, vmware esx 3.5 lab with various distro’s of linux and windows flavors.

what about you?

[Michael J. Conway]

Your lab sounds similar to ours though we also have a few stand alone machines running various OSes. We use Gentoo for our test events with various tools.

[ethicalhack3r]

I use vmware and a stand alone machine that I keep swapping OS’s on. At the minute it has windows 2000 sp0.

[jason]

I have a pretty beefy machine with vmware workstation on it that I use for most of my testing. I also have a couple crash and burn machines around for misc testing.

[RoleReversal]

I’ve got a powerfulish box running VMware Workstation for most of the buffer overflow/bruteforce type stuff.

For stuff that is harder to replicate in a virtual environment (for me it’s; ARP redirection and mitm stuff, I find the VMWare network to produce some ‘strange’ results for some network based things that I can’t duplicate in a real-world environment) I generally use a few live boot CDs on whatever hardware is lying around [including the gf’s laptop when desperate, shhh….]. Once you’re done remove CD and everything is back the way it was. Generally removes the build and rebuild cycle from crash and burn boxes.

Finally my day-to-day laptop doubles as a wireless platform when the need arises.

I’m current looking to expand my lab though, I’m eagerly awaiting Build Your Own Security Lab (cheers Bill) to arrive through my letterbox. Hopefully it will provide some good ideas.

[jason]

I just got a copy of it recently. It’s a pretty good one.

[MadmanTM]

thanks everyone 🙂 ill probably get a lot of books in january 😀

[shednik]

I just built a new machine a 2.8 Core2duo with 4GB of RAM running linux and vmware server…runs like a champ 🙂

[jason]

I’ve been playing a bit with virtualbox recently. Not too shabby for the most part.

[apollo]

Virtualbox is great with one exception, the networking.  If you are interested in having your own network and putting all of the virtual boxes on the network through NAT, then Virtualbox is cake to setup.  The one beef that I have is that it sucks to have to create individual bridge adapters and then more individual adapters for each box linked with the bridge device.  Then if you want DHCP on a host only network, you need to set that up yourself.  In comparison to VMware, virtualbox needs to fix that.  As far as speed, I think Virtualbox is much faster and seems to have a smaller memory footprint.  For my linux boxes, I use virtualbox as my VM architecture since the hardware support seems great.

As far as lab boxes,  I have 2 linux boxes, one a quad core 4g ram and one a dual core with 2g of ram that I use.  I use ESX server on them and have a host only network on each with a small linux box I use as a gateway server and allow or disallow bridging when I need it to bridge the host only network to the real word for software downloads etc.  I have a number of other boxes that I use in bridged mode to do testing with.  This setup is nice in that there are some boxes that I really REALLY don’t want on the network, such as XP sp0 boxes, and others which require network access. 

[charlottebandit]

Attack:  2 laptops running VM Workstation

Servers:  tower running VM Workstation

Infrastructure:  (2) Cisco 3750 switches, (2) 5510 ASAs, 2811 & 3825 routers, (2) Cisco 802.11n APs, (1) WLAN Controller, (2) MARS Gen-1 boxes, HP server for CSA-MC, Cisco Web Application Firewall, and ACS server (AAA).

Trying to get Network Admission Control (NAC) network modules for wired/wireless integration within the routers, and an IPS module for the ASA firewall which will also integrate with wireless.  Although I could simply run a VM image of the NAC Server & Mgr on the HP server for some cool shit.  LOL

;D

[shednik]

@charlottebandit wrote:

Attack:  2 laptops running VM Workstation

Servers:  tower running VM Workstation

Infrastructure:  (2) Cisco 3750 switches, (2) 5510 ASAs, 2811 & 3825 routers, (2) Cisco 802.11n APs, (1) WLAN Controller, (2) MARS Gen-1 boxes, HP server for CSA-MC, Cisco Web Application Firewall, and ACS server (AAA).

Trying to get Network Admission Control (NAC) network modules for wired/wireless integration within the routers, and an IPS module for the ASA firewall which will also integrate with wireless.  Although I could simply run a VM image of the NAC Server & Mgr on the HP server for some cool shit.  LOL

;D

Wow thats a hefty lab, have you just collected that much gear over time?

[charlottebandit]

A little here and there but mostly stuff from work since we work lots with Cisco stuff. 

[Author]

Posts