Club Lab
The club is standing up a shared lab environment for members to practice on.
Here is why that matters: right now, if you want to practice attacking something, you either use a public platform or you go looking for a target on your own. The second option is how people end up somewhere they should not be, even by accident. A club lab fixes that — it is a machine (or set of machines) that exists specifically so you are allowed to attack it. No permission-seeking, no wondering if this is okay. It is the point of the thing.
That is the entire idea: a safe, shared, explicitly-in-scope target, so nobody practices on something they should not touch.
What a Lab Actually Is
A lab is not one VM you spin up and poke at. It is three layers stacked on top of each other, and each layer depends on the one below it.
The Hardware Layer
Somewhere, real hardware has to run the virtual machines. A hypervisor is the software that turns one physical machine into several virtual ones. Running it on a dedicated server, instead of everyone’s personal laptop, is what makes a shared lab possible in the first place. See Proxmox for how that works.
The Network Layer
Every machine in the lab needs a network to talk on. That network must stay separate from the FAU campus network — a lab is where you are allowed to attack things, and that permission does not extend one inch past the lab’s own network boundary. Both pages below cover how this isolation is built, because it matters at every layer.
The Target Layer
One VM is a target. A range is several VMs wired together so they behave like a small, real network — a domain controller, some clients, a server, somewhere to attack from. This is the part that turns “a VM you can poke at” into something worth practicing on. See Building an End-to-End Range.
The Two Pages Here
- Proxmox — the hypervisor that runs the lab’s hardware layer. VMs vs. containers, storage and snapshots, and the isolated networking a shared lab needs.
- Building an End-to-End Range — how you take a pile of VMs on that hypervisor and wire them into one environment that behaves like a real target network.
Read them in that order. The first page is the box the lab runs on. The second is what you build on top of it.
Status
This is a stub. The lab is not live yet. Specifics — what it runs, how you get access, what is and is not in scope, how resets work — are still being decided. This page will be filled in once those decisions are made.
If you want to help shape this, this is a good place to show up and ask questions. See Projects & Guides for how to get involved.
- Proxmox Proxmox VE as the bare-metal hypervisor that runs the club lab, and the concepts you need to understand it.
- Building an End-to-End Range How individual VMs get wired together into one range that behaves like a small company network.