Building out a learning lab

So you want to learn more. You want to dive into Linux a bit, dabble in some hacking, maybe try out a Docker container or two? Maybe you found your way here from the JMU Cyber Defense Club.

But where do you start?

That's the question that everyone asks and each person has a different answer for. The place that I started at isn't going to be the place that the person that comes after me might best start learning at. However, I personally believe that having some sort of framework to follow will enable more people to learn more easily.

I've heard the phrase in work (and life) so many times: "We don't know what we don't know." At work, I hated that phrase - it seemed to be hiding behind a façade of willful ignorance on topics or strategies that needed to be addressed years prior to me joining a company. In my personal life and in learning, it's a great and frustrating phrase.

If you're going to learn something new, you don't know all the topics to research. You won't have a table of contents of topics that you can dive into. You might spend a few months learning some new technology only to discover something replaced it years ago that you never even heard about. And while it may be frustrating and feel like you've wasted your time, trust me when I say that the time spent on learning something isn't for nothing. Maybe there are key components that still apply. Maybe you've sharpened your note taking and research skills. Maybe you've simply found a way to devote time to learning and labbing.

We'll touch on all of those things and more as we go on, but I wanted to at least give one possible pathway for setting up a small computer lab at your house/apartment/cloud/wherever works for you. Trust me again - spending even a little time towards something like this is incredibly beneficial. My career has gone in great directions due to even the small chunks I was able to put towards dedicated lab learning. Maybe, at the very least, you'll learn the things you have no desire to work on for a career.

This will be the start of a multi-part series. We'll use a single PC, install Proxmox as a hypervisor, and a few VMs to try out a few things. Hopefully you'll be able to use it as a framework to follow or even to springboard off of into your own direction.