Home Lab

Home Lab Build

This seems like good time to dust off the home lab gear. So I’ve pulled the hardware out and made sure everything has downloaded all the updates.

My lab is pretty simple.
The network is a FortiGate, FortiSwitch and FortiAP.
The compute and storage is a desktop that I’ve jammed as many SSDs into as I can.
I’m running Hyper-V on Windows 10, because it is simple and provides the features I need.

The rest of the house also uses the Fortinet devices, so I’ve put the lab “server” on its own VLAN.
This allows me to setup all the trappings of an AD domain, with out any bleed over into the rest of the house.
And since everyone is home all the time and using the network - I can’t have my lab be a bottleneck.
I need to be able to reboot or simply shutdown my lab, without it affecting regular operations.

Because the FortiSwitch is managed by the FortiGate I created the new VLAN on the FortiGate, assigned it to the port I had connected the “server” to, and then built firewall rules around this VLAN.
I can lock down access into and out of this VLAN on the FortiGate to as granular as required, without any additional configuration on any other devices.
So I can access and manage my lab without it impacting the rest of the family.

Home Lab Plan

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to test out first - but I have some Active Direcotry Certificate Services questions I would like to get answers too, and the best way is probably to just test it all out.
However, before I start building out all the servers for that, I think I will start with how to best setup and tear down a lab. I know there are many options in this space, and I’ve played with several of them a little bit in the past, but it’s been a while.
I suspect I will have something next week to post about my experiments in steamlined lab setup.