I’ve been reading a bit about how to set up a home lab to support my learning of info security and it occurs to me that I probably don’t need to do it. Not yet at least. Don’t get me wrong, it makes for a great project in and of itself and is definitely a handy resource, but I’m at the stage where I’ve no solid idea of what aspects of info security I’m actually going to pursue. At the moment I’m just exploring the broad strokes of the industry.
If I decide to go into wireless network security my needs will be very different than if I go into reverse engineering malware or bug bounties or network traffic analysis. So I don’t really know what kind of home lab I need.
It seems to me the best bet, for now at least, is to simply do projects (of whatever stripe I’m interested in exploring) and setup the lab infrastructure I need to support those actual projects rather than trying to create a lab that’s flexible enough to do everything I might possibly be interested in.
On the other hand, maybe it makes sense to try to create a lab that is flexible enough to accomodate all my future needs. Within reason at least. For now I’ll hold off and just build something incrementally as needs arise. Maybe you should do the same?