To begin with..

In the beginning, much of what I'll be writing about may not concern security specifically.  Once a few preparatory things are out of the way, that should change.  For some time now, my skills in security have stagnated.  The systems at home have aged little-by-little, and what once was my lab is now a few Frankenstein-ed systems that don't really work well for a lab.  In addition to that, I've changed jobs over the years, and my current position doesn't afford me the time or equipment at work to do any kind of research.

Hoping to get myself back on track, I've purchased a 1u Supermicro Twin.  The goal here will be to set up a series of virtual machines and virtual networks that will allow me to do experiments and tinker with things I haven't had the opportunity to do previously.  This blog will primarily serve as a catalog of the interesting things that come up as I get the system configured and begin experimenting.

I've started by laying down CentOS with Xen to handle it all.  Once it's built up and I'm happy with it, I'll host it in a colo facility.  Until then, I'll be working on it at home.  While the system is a 1u chassis, it's actually two distinct systems, each with 8 intel cores, 16 GB of ram, and two 1.5 TB SATA drives.  So that little 1u system could provide me with 16 cores, 32 GB of ram, and 6 TB of storage (actually 3 - I'll be mirroring).  I've opted to use LVM, with one volume group of 200GB for the OS, and the remaining 1TB as a seperate volume group for the virtual machines, each of which will have their own volume.