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Before setting up any servers or hardware, I needed to make sure my topology lay out is logical, and also completely isolates my lab environment from other devices on the network. That way when I inevetibally mess up, only my lab will get affected - super impo...

Home labbing can get expensive, and its incredibly important to protect your gear. To prevent any electrical damage that could occur from power failures, I purchased a CyberPower CP1500 System. This model is a PFC Sine Wave system, which is important as it wil...

In addition to the UPS, I also purchased a 1U 10 outlet surge protector and have mounted it to my rack. The surge protector is grounded and will protect any other devices from power failure damage, like my Eero AP and NETGEAR switch

iDRAC9 is Dell's version of remotely accessing and controlling the server. This was probably one of the most important parts of my homelab, as it lets me configure, power on and off, and control the server from anywhere in the house or via my VPN connection ...

I purchased this server from PC Server & Parts via Ebay.com, a reputed and certified seller of refurbished enterprise gear and hardware. Dell PowerEdge servers are extremely configurable, which can make it difficult to select the "right" server to purchase. So...

As stated on the previous page, the SFF OptiPlex had the capacity to add an additional NIC to the motherboard. I purchased an Intel I350-T4 NIC, which is a quad port gigabit NIC. I purchased the card for around $40.00 off of Ebay, but it had a full server heig...

I purchased this Dell OptiPlex 7050 via Ebay for around $60.00. It is a small form factor (SFF) desktop, with additional PCIe expansion slots, which made it a suitable alternative to other dedicated hardware these days for firewall appliances. The desktop spec...

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Installing OPNsense onto hardware is quite easy and straight forward. Download the ISO from their official website opnsense.org and create a bootable drive. You can use Rufus, balenaEtcher, or any other software to burn the ISO onto the drive. I used Ventoy, a...

At the minimum, your host machine for OPNsense should have the following: 1GHz Dual Core CPU 2 GB RAM The recommended hardware, per OPNsense official documentation is as follows: 1.5 GHz CPU 8 GB RAM 120 GB SSD This recommended set up will allow...

After installation, a message will appear stating the Web GUI is available at XXXX.XXXX.XXXX.XXXX My web GUI is @ 192.168.1.1 Login Page Login as root, with the password you set up during installation. Once you go through the initial set up wizard, your d...

OPNsense allows you to set up Interfaces, which can be used to set up separate networks. I set up 2 interfaces to allow my homelab to operate on 1, and all other devices (including my roommates) to operate on the other. The Interface assignments are as follows...

ZenArmor has a robust set of rules and policies you can enforce. The free version they offer will enforce "essential" security rules for up to 100 devices. You can find the policies and configure them by navigating to the Policies tab under the ZenArmor sectio...

ZenArmor allows you to also manage your firewall via their cloud console. Once configured and set up with your ZenArmor account, you can configure and manage several deployments of ZenArmor to the same extent as you could via OPNsense. Cloud Management can be ...

One of the best features of ZenArmor, is it's real-time Cloud Reputation and Threat Intelligence. These features are served through what they call ZenArmor Cloud, which is hosted by them, using a Google Cloud Infrastructure. ZenArmor Cloud is essentially a dat...

There are several ways to install and deploy ZenArmor and its utilities. I chose to install it's plug-ins via my OPNsense Web GUI. To install, navigate to through System --> Firmware --> Plugins and locate the os-sunnyvalley plugin. These are the plugins I cur...

One of the greatest features of next-generation firewalls, are it's reporting dashboards and visualization capabilities. Below you'll see some of the dashboards of my firewall after only having it running for 48 hours. These dashboards are available in both, t...

Thankfully I have a dynamic WAN IP that has since changed, making it alright to post this

BookStack is a self-hosted platform that allows you to store information in an organized and accessible way. There are several reasons I chose this, but mainly, it's ease of use and deployment. I was looking for something similar to Confluence from Atlassian, ...

Bookstack is a web application that is built on a LAMP stack. My deployment uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP to run services. Currently, I have this web application deployed on an Ubuntu Server. Digital Ocean I utilized Digital Ocean, which is Cloud Infras...