I finally took action on my long-standing intention to build a security testing lab. Tomorrow I will get my hardware, a PowerEdge R900 with 128GB RAM, 8 NICs and a moderate bunch of disk. Since I haven’t done this before, I’m putting a lot of time into planning.

I’m using a design and architecture developed by da_667 to get insight into IPS behavior when monitoring attack traffic. So the test range contains a victim VM (metasploitable 2), a Kali box to mount attacks from, a pfSense firewall, and Snort/Suricata and Splunk boxes.

Update: got my Dell R900. For some reason I failed to get my ESXi install bits onto the media I thought I copied them to. Minor setback. This thing weighs 95 pounds. o_O