Earlier this week, I built my own computer. Well, kind of. Let me explain.
I was recently accepted into a cybersecurity program. Having very little experience in IT, but a strong desire for a career change, I’ve decided to put all that I can into my studies to progress as quickly as possible. At the suggestion of my instructor, I decided to build my own lab environment. I went with a build based on this one from 7 Minute Security.
This build uses an Intel NUC, and went together like a 4 pc lego set — quick and easy. I had never actually seen SODIMM RAM before; they were much smaller than I had anticipated! After snapping everything together, I needed to put an Operating System (OS) on it. Being that it is to host virtual machines, I decided to make it a type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor using VMware ESXi. I ran into a problem creating a bootable USB when I went the command-line route. Using DISKPART, I believe I formatted and partitioned the drive correctly; I think the problem was with actually saving the ESXi image file to the drive. I ended up using a tool called Rufus to make a bootable USB.
ESXi installed, ethernet cable plugged in, and IP address provided by DHCP, my little NUC was ready to go. I logged into the IP address to explore the VMware Graphical User Interface (GUI). I have yet to create any virtual machines (VMs) on it, but am looking forward to that next step. Eventually, I’d like to explore pentesting with my lab, but in the immediate future, I am looking to just use the VMs to familiarize myself with other operating systems and tools.
A couple of questions / options I’d like to explore in the future:
Should I assign a static IP address to the NUC so I don’t need to plug it into a monitor solely to see what IP address I need to go to?
Or, alternatively, once I get to know some Linux distros, should I consider converting the NUC into a type 2 hypervisor. At the expense of some RAM, this would allow me to have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached to the NUC at all times, and use the NUC to interface with the VMs.
