Day 10 of 100

After narrowly avoiding disaster the previous day, I opted to learn a little about setting up a home lab. I am now convinced that my laptop is better suited for a virtual home lab, seeing as it is 10 years old at this point, and I’m asking quite a bit of it as of late.

Once settled on my decision to do all of my home lab in the virtual realm, I wanted to find something cheap or free. AWS was the first thing that fit the bill.

Setting up the account is pretty straightforward, and I was soon presented with a panel of options that were quite perplexing. I have no idea what I’m looking at, or really what my next step should be. Back to Google!

I followed a tutorial as best I could, but was quite discouraged as the format the video was showing was very different from what I was presented with. I suppose, AWS went through a design change that in my opinion was actually a step back in usability. I eventually came across a video that was close enough to what I was seeing that creating a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) was not much harder than sending an email. The next step was creating an EC2 instance (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), specifically an Ubuntu server. I was then instructed to create a Private Key and save it in the .ppk format.

Once that was complete, it was time to try and SSH into it. I was advised to use a program called Putty, but that it was created for Windows. Some searching showed me that it was possible to install it on Linux, and I was able to accomplish that via the CLI. There were a few issues on my end not really understanding how to use the program, but using the tutorial’s steps for the Windows version worked just fine on my Linux version.

I SSH’d into a server that I created on AWS!

How cool is that? I started that day without a virtual server, and now I’m ending it with one. I’ve only ever used the #thm website to do anything remotely (pun, sorry) close to this.

Now the next step is to lay out how I want the home lab to look like, build it, harden it and secure it.