Home Lab

This entire home lab upgrade came from one thing: networking with people, not just devices. 😉 A new connection believed in what I’m building and generously passed along real enterprise-grade gear that had been collecting dust, turning it into a fully fledged learning environment instead.

Current lineup now includes:
Cisco Catalyst 4948 (L3 core), Catalyst 2960-X, Catalyst 2960-S, Fortinet FortiGate 90D, Sophos XG, 3Com MSR router, patch panel, mock KVM console with Ubuntu, CyberPower GmbH PDU, and rack — essentially a miniature enterprise network stack.

One of the biggest learning moments was resetting the Catalyst 4948. Unlike the 2960s, it doesn’t have a Mode button, so the process required dropping into ROMMON, manually adjusting the configuration register, bypassing startup-config, correcting boot variables, and recovering IOS before returning it to a clean factory state. That kind of low-level recovery is exactly the type of scenario you face in real environments when inheriting legacy or misconfigured infrastructure. Still managed to go way faster than the first time around!

This lab now mirrors the layers SOC, Network Engineering, and Security Engineering all intersect with:
• Switching and VLAN segmentation
• Layer 3 routing and inter-VLAN
• Firewall policy and traffic inspection
• SPAN for IDS/packet analysis
• Enterprise authentication and management planes

Next steps:
– Finalize rack layout and airflow
– Stand up management VLANs and trunking
– Deploy FortiGate inline
– Configure SPAN to feed an IDS VM
– Build detection labs that simulate real attack paths and blue-team response